lews  AND  Reviews 


ART 


Olive-Percival 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


VIEWS    AND    REVIEWS 


IN  UNIFORM  BINDING 


ANDREW  LANG 

Letters  to  Dead  Authors   -      -   ^i  oo 

AUGUSTINE  BIRRELL 

Obiter  Dicta— First  Series  -     -      i  oo 

Obiter  Dicta— Second  Series  -      i  oo 

Men,  Women  and  Books       -      i  oo 

Res  Judicata      -----      i  oo 

W.  E.  HENLEY 

Views  and  Reviews— Literature     i  oo 

Views  and  Reviews— Art  -     -      i  oo 

Lyra  Heroica    -     -     -     -     -      >  25 

BARRETT  WENDELL 

Stelligeri  and  Other  Essays     -      1  25 


VIEWS 
AND  REVIEWS 

ESSAYS 

IN   APPRECIATION 

By  W.  E.  HENLEY 


ART 


? 


,)    '  > ,  '   ■>  ' 


>  1   11  1  '  '  i     1     1     '' 


NEW    YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S   SONS 

1902 


•   «  •  • 


•  •  •      *  k 

•  •  •    «  •  • 


•  •  •      • 

•  -    •    • 


••       •,*         ••         .,• 
•  -••       •,-         «•• 

ft  •       «      ■  •    •        • 


TO 

ROBERT,  LORD  WINDSOR 

THESE    ESSAYS 

IN    THE    APPRECIATION 

OF    AN    ART    HE    PRACTISES 

AND    LOVES 

W.  E.  H. 

Worthing,  January  1902. 


library'' 


PREFATORY 

To  hold  opinions  and  state  conclusions  about  an 
art  whose  technical  processes  are  strange,  and  whose 
practice  is  impossible  :  this,  it  has  ever  seemed  to  me, 
is  to  take  oneself  more  seriously  than  he  may  do  that 
would  sit  well  with  posterity.  And  yet,  humauum 
est  errare  :  to  hold  views,  and  to  publish  them,  is 
human;  and  in  this  bookling  I  confess  myself 
as  naturally  given  as  the  rest.  Indeed,  I  have 
taken  not  a  little  pleasure  in  the  work  of  recover- 
ing and  presenting  its  materials  from  the  several 
volumes  in  which  they  were  dissembled  ;  for,  to  be 
plain,  I  have  seen  little  to  change,  and  more 
than  once,  as  in  the  case  of  the  living  Rodin  and 
the  dead  Charles  Keene,  I  have  found  myself  revis- 
ing stuff  which  has  so  much  the  trick  of  to-day,  as 
to  .seem  commonplace  and  old.  Yet  was  it  written 
near  a  dozen  years  ago,  and,  at  the  time  of  writing, 
sounded  alike  violent  and  new  and  singular.  In  the 
same  way  I  see  no  reason  for  mitigating  what  I  wrote 
of  Corot  and  Courbet,  of  Meissonier  and  Delacroijs, 
of  Rousseau  and  Vollon,  of  Monticelli  and  Rossetti, 
Reynolds  and  Gainsborough,  Constable  and  Millet 
and  the  brothers  Maris.       It  is  not  all  the  truth  I 


X  PREFATORY 

know ;  but  I  believe  that  it  is  mostly  by  way  of  being 
true,  and  I  pass  it  on  for  what  it  is  worth.  Frankly, 
I  think  it  is  worth  something  :  whether  little  or  much 
is  not  for  me  to  say.  If  I  mistake,  and  it  he  naught 
(like  the  Knight's  pancakes),  at  least  I  may  claim  to 
have  read  few  books  into  my  pictures,  to  have  done  my 
best  to  keep  my  painting  more  or  less  unlettered,  to 
have  proffered  my  conclusions,  such  as  they  are, 
fairly  well  purged  of  sentiment.  So  did  not  Hazlitt, 
nor  did  Raskin  ;  and  if  it  must  be  that  I  fail  with 
these,  I  doubt  not  {such  is  the  vanity  of  Man)  that 
I  shall  take  a  sour  pleasure  in  reflecting  that,  be 
things  as  they  may,  my  failure  is  not  on  all-fours 
with  theirs. 

It  remains  to  add  that  what  is  hereafter  set  forth 
is  selected  from  (1)  the  'Catalogue'  (1888)  of  that 
Loan  Collection  of  French  and  Dutch  Pictures  (the 
first  of  its  kind  done  in  these  Islands)  which,  thanks 
to  my  dear  dead  friend,  Robert  Hamilton-Bruce, 
makes  memorable  the  Edinburgh  International  Exhi- 
bition of  1886;  (2)  the  'Century  of  Artists'  (1889), 
prepared  by  Messrs.  MacLehose  as  a  Memorial  of  the 
Glasgow  Exhibition  in  1888  ;  (3)  the  little  '  Catalogue 
of  a  Loan  Collection  of  Pictures  by  the  Great  French 
and  Dutch  Romanticists  of  this  Century,'  prepared 
for  the  Messrs.  Dowdeswell  in  1889 ;  and  (4)  the 
'Sir  Henry  Raeburn,'  published  by  tlie  Royal  Associ- 
ation for  the  Promotion  of  the  Fine  Arts  in  Scotland 
in  1890.  The  Keene  and  the  Rodin  date  from  the 
same  year,  in  the  May  and  June  of  which  they  were 


PREFATORY  xi 

contributed  to  '  The  National  Observer ' ;  while  the  last 
number  of  all  was  written  for  '  The  Pall  Mall 
Magazine '  as  late  as  the  July  of  1900.  Here  and 
there  I  have  rewritten  ;  here  and  there  I  have  added 
notes;  here  and  there  I  have  done  what  I  could  to 
mend  the  style.  But  I  have  modernized  nothing; 
and  on  thr  irhole  I  am  well  enough  pleased  to  leave 
the  older  stuff  much  as  I  lejl  it  years  ago. 

W.    E.   H. 


CONTENTS 

A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM 

Hernani:  'Les  vaillants  de  mil-huit-cetit-trente' : 
Of  Nativities :  Napoleon :  The  Classic : 
First  Causes  of  Romanticism  :  Sir  Walter: 

The    Wicked  Lord  B .•  Style;  Et  puis 

voild!  Gros :  David:  A  Gascon  Gascon  et 
demi :  De  Forti  Dulcedo :  Giricault  and 
Delacroix  :  The  Romantic  Ideal :  le  Drame  : 
Of  Landscape:  Before  and  After:  Con- 
stable. 


PAGE 

I 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES— 


GEORGES  MICHEL 

.    40 

INGRES   .... 

.    41 

COROT    .... 

'   43 

EUGENE  DELACROIX  . 

•   45 

BONINGTON 

.   52 

DECAMPS  .... 

•   55 

DIAZ     .... 

•   57 

TROYON  .... 

.    .   58 

DUPRE   .... 

.   60 

XIV 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

THEODORK     ROUSSEAU 

6i 

MILLET      . 

• 

.       68 

JACQUE       . 

• 

•       70 

LEYS 

• 

•       71 

MEISSONIER 

» 

.       72 

DAUBIGNY 

■ 

•       74 

FRERE 

•       75 

ZIEM 

* 

'       76 

MONTICELLI 

•       77 

GEROME    . 

» 

80 

JULES    BRETON . 

Si 

VOLLON      . 

82 

FANTIN-LATOUR 

84 

LEGROS      . 

84 

BASTIEN-LEPAGE 

• 

85 

FIVE  DUTCHMEN— 

BOSBOOM  . 
ISRAELS     . 
JACOBUS    MARIS 
MAUVE       , 
MATTHVS    MARIS 


88 
89 
92 

93 
95 


c 

ONTI 

i:nts 

XV 

PAGE 

SOME  landsc;ape  painters— 

NASMYTH 

98 

TURNER     . 

99 

CONSTAIU.E 

103 

COTMAN    . 

109 

DAVID    COX 

1 10 

WILLIAMS 

III 

DE    WINT 

112 

LINNELL  . 

113 

MiJLLER    . 

114 

SAM    BOUGH 

115 

CECIL    LAWSON 

116 

THOMSON    OF    DUDDINGSTON 

117 

FOUR  PORTRAIT  PAINTERS— 

REYNOLDS              .... 

119 

GAINSBOROUGH  .... 

122 

ROMNEY    

123 

RAEBURN 

• 

124 

ARTISTS  AND  AMATEURS- 

GEORGE    MORLAND 
DAVID    WILKIE  . 


130 


XVI 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

PROUT 

134 

HUNT 

•        135 

LANDSEER 

136 

HARVEY    . 

138 

PHILLIP     . 

138 

ROSSETTI 

139 

CHALMERS 

144 

PINWELL  . 

145 

FRANK    HOLL 

146 

MANSON    . 

147 

TWO  MODERNS- 
CHARLES  KEENE 
AUGUSTE    RODIN 


149 
154 


A  CRITIC  OF  ART         .  .         .         .      i6i 

Concerning  Critics  :  R.  A.  M.  Stevenson  :  His 
influence:  'Bob':  In  Letters  and  Talk: 
Tlie  Cousins :  Par  Nobile  Fratrum, 


VIEWS    AND    REVIEWS 


p 


VIEWS    AND    REVIEWS 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM 

Eighteen-Thirty  has  been  called  the  Ninety- 
Three  of  the  arts ;  and  tlie  description  has  a 
certain  justness.  In  that  year,  in- 
deed, was  fought  and  won  the  battle  Hernnni 
of  Heniani,  and  what  had  seemed  a 
revolt  was  recognised  and  proclaimed  a  revolu- 
tion. Too  much  has  been  made  of  the  affair,  no 
doubt :  the  interest  was  mainly  one  of  style,  the 
hero  was  a  representative  man  of  letters,  the 
memory  is  one  that  literary  men  have  united  to 
exalt  and  cherish.  But  the  work  of  reform  was 
already  as  good  as  done.  Balzac  had  published 
les  Chouans,  Dumas  had  created  the  type  of  the 
modern  historical  play  in  Henri  Trois  et  sa  cour, 
Constable  had  appeared  and  conquered,  Delacroix 
had  exhibited  the  Massacre  de  Scio  and  the  Mort 
de  Sardanapale,  Huet  and  Isabey  had  broken  new 
ground  in  landscape.  Rude  and  Barye  were 
violating  as   they  would  the  academical  ideal  of 

A 


2  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

sculpture,  Macready  and  Miss  Smithson  had  been 
seen  and  heard  in  Shakespeare's  own  Othello, 
Frederick  was  renowned  both  as  the  Macaire  of 
I'Auberge  des  Adrets  and  the  Georges  de  Germany 
of  Trente  ans,  the  Meditations  of  Lamartine  was 
almost  an  old  book,  Habeneck  had  founded  the 
Conservatoire  concerts,  Berlioz  was  hard  at  work 
on  the  Symphonie  fantastique,  Sainte-Beuve  had 
produced  the  famous  Tableau  historique  et  critique, 
while  Hugo  himself  had  renewed  and  reinspired 
the  lyric  faculty  of  France  :  so  that  in  the  matter 
of  essentials  not  much  remained  to  accomplish  or 
essay.  But  when  all  is  said,  the  occasion  was 
momentous.  The  poet's  claim  amounted  to  nothing 
less  than  the  prescriptive  right  of  every  artist  to  be 
as  lawless  as  Shakespeare  seemed  ;  his  opponents 
urged  that  salvation  there  was  none  without  the 
mint  and  anise  and  cummin  exacted  by  Racine 
and  Boileau ;  and  for  five-and-forty  nights  the 
question  was  debated  before  and  by  the  audiences 
of  the  Theatre-Fran^ais.  The  work  of  a  magni- 
ficent and  entirely  histrionic  vulgarian,  Hernaid  is 
rather  au  intermittent  five-act  lyric  than  a  drama. 
But  it  took  its  place  beside  le  Cid ;  and  there  was 
demonstrated  with  every  circumstance  of  publicity 
— what  is  equally  true  of  Sophocles  and  Hugo,  of 
the  Iliad  and  la  Heine  Margot — that  in  the  com- 
position of  a  work  of  art  tlie  individual  genius  of 
the  artist  counts  for  at  least  as  much  as  the  prin- 
ciples on  which  he  has  wrought. 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM 


What  is  called  Romanticism — the  change,  that 
is,  in  the  material,  the  treatment,  and  the  technical 
methods  and  ideals  of  art  which  was 

made   ni  the   1*  ranee  or   Charles   x. 

J     T      •    m  •!•  .,  .      de  Mil-huit- 

ana     Louis-1  hilippe — was    the    out- 

come  of  a  generation  rich  in  strenu- 
ous and  potent  individualities.  The  great  emotions 
of  the  Republic  and  the  Empire  had  induced 
such  an  efflorescence  of  temperament  and  genius 
as  the  world  has  not  often  seen.  The  sug- 
gestion is  one  that  might  easily  be  ridden  to 
death  ;  but  I  will  note  that  the  inspiration  of  the 
time  was  wholly  Napoleon's,  and  it  might  be 
argued  with  some  show  of  reason  that  Romanticism 
was  as  much  a  part  of  his  legacy  as  the  Code 
itself,  or  the  memories  of  Austerlitz  and  Mont- 
mirail.  It  is  at  any  rate  certain  that  the  period 
of  his  ascendency  was  a  time  of  intense  and  peculiar 
suffering,  that  it  was  also  a  time  of  enormous 
enterprise  and  achievement,  and  that  it  was 
under  the  pressure  of  these  conditions  that  the 
men  and  women  of  the  Romantic  revival — '  cette 
grande  generation  de  Mille-huit-cent-trente,'  says 
Gautier,  with  honourable  pride,  '  qui  marquera 
dans  I'avenir,  et  dont  on  parlera  comme  d'une 
des  epoques  climate'riques  de  I'esprit  humain' — 
were  engendered  and  conceived. 


4  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

It  is  only  the  few  who  date  from  earlier  days. 
Mme.  de  Stael,  the  Eve  of  Romanticism,  was  born 

in  176G,    five    years    before  Walter 
Of  Nativities  Scott;  Chateaubriand,  the  archetype 

of  the  movement  in  splendour  of 
style  and  insincerity  of  sentiment,  in  1768; 
Senancour,  whose  Obermann  (1804)  had  so  deep 
and  lasting  an  influence  on  Sainte-Beuve  and 
George  Sand,  in  1770.  Beranger,  Ingres,  and 
Charles  Nodier  followed  in  1780  ;  Habeneck  in 
1781;  Lamennais  and  Rude  in  1782  and  1783  ;  Mile. 
Georges,  the  original  Lucrece  Borgia  and  Mar- 
guerite de  Bourgogne,  in  178G ;  David  d' Angers 
in  1789 — a  year  after  Byron  ;  Gericault,  Scribe, 
and  Lamartine — with  Meyerbeer,  whose  share  in 
Romanticism  is  large  enough  almost  to  make  a 
Frenchman  of  him — in  1791;  Charlet  in  1792; 
and  Lablache  in  1793.  All  these,  however,  were 
the  elders  of  the  movement,  whose  more  active  and 
more  characteristic  forces  began  to  be  in  one  or 
other  of  the  twenty  years  between  the  beginning 
of  1795 — which  saw  the  birth  of  the  historian 
Thierry  and  the  sculptor  Barye — and  the  end  of 
1814 — which  gave  Prince  Bismarck  to  Germany, 
and  to  France  the  painter  of  the  Glaneuses  and  the 
Berger  au  pare.  Corot  came  in  1796;  Thiers  and 
Pierre  Leroux,  in  1797  ;  Michelet  and  Mery  in 
1798 ;  Balzac,  Hale'vy,  Henri  Monnier,  Alfred  de 
Vigny^  and  Eugene  Delacroix  in  1799,  Frederick 
Lemaitre,  the  hero  of  half  a  hundred  memorable 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  5 

dramas,  was,  like  Heine,   '  one  of  the  first  meu  of 
the  century' ;  his  rival,  Bocage,  and  his  'female,' 
Marie  Dorval — the  Dorval  of  Antony,  Chatterton, 
Angela,    Marion   Deloi'me—yvere,    like   Atala,   the 
offspring   of    1801,    as   were    Ernest    Littre,    the 
satirist    Gavarni,    and     the    admirable    comedian 
Lafont.     Next  year  was  the  year  of  the  Genie  du 
Christianisme,   and    among   its   births   were  those 
of   Victor    Hugo,    Lacordaire,    Froment-Meurice, 
Eugene  Isabey,    Camille    Flers,    and    Alexandre 
Dumas ;     those     of    Berlioz,     Merimee,    Quinet, 
Decamps,    and   Tony   Johannot,    were   registered 
in    1803 :    those    of    Delphine   Gay   and    Aurore 
Dudevant,    of    Nestor    Roqueplan,    RaflFet,    Paul 
Huet,  Saiute-Beuve,  the  musician  Hippolyte  Mon- 
pou  —  and    at    Stockholm    Marie    Taglioni  —  are 
credited  to  1804.     In  1805,  connate  with  our  own 
Disraeli,  a  romantique   of  the  first  magnitude  in 
his  way  and  day,  were  the  poets  Auguste  Barbier 
and  Gerard  de  Nerval,  the  painter  Eugene  Devoria 
— for  a  year  or  two  '  le  V^eronese  de  la  France ' — 
and  the  novelist  Charles  de   Bernard.       In    180G 
were  born  the  tenor  Duprez  and  Louis  Boulanger, 
artist  in  lithography  of  a  once  famous  Ronde  du 
sahbat,  and  in  colour  of  a  once  famous  Mazeppa ; 
in  1808,  Maria  Malibran,  the  painter   Diaz,  and 
the    actor-sculptor    Melingue,    the  original   d'Ar- 
tagnan,  the  original  Chicot,  the  original  Henri  de 
Lagardere ;   in   1810,    Hege'sippe  Moreau,  Monta- 
lembffirt,  Constant  Troyon,  Alfred  de  Musset,  and 


6  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

the  incomparable  draughtsman,  the  tremendous 
caricaturist  Honore  Daumier  ;  in  1811,  the  year  of 
Thackeray  and  Liszt,  Theophile  Gautier  and  Jules 
Dupre  ;  in  1812,  Theodore  Rousseau  in  Paris  and 
(Charles  Dickens  at  Portsmouth  ;  and  in  1813,  with 
Ridiard  Wagner — in  whose  work  the  Romantic 
ambition  was  to  find  its  most  extravagant  expression 
— at  Leipzig,  the  dramatist  Felicien  Mallefille  and 
Louis  Veuillot  the  polemist  and  journalist.  Tlie 
list,  which  might  be  made  longer,  is  already  lonj; 
enough  ;  but  its  variety  is  even  more  remarkable 
than  its  length.  In  the  intellectual  history  of  the 
world  it  would,  I  apprehend,  be  difficult,  if  not 
impossible,  to  name  an  epoch  in  which  so  many 
men  attained  to  such  eminence  in  so  many  of  the 
arts  at  once.  We  think  of  the  Age  of  Pericles  as 
the  Age  of  Sculpture,  of  the  Age  of  Elizabeth  as 
the  Age  of  the  Poetic  Drama.  Romanticism  brings 
into  action  the  full  orchestra  of  the  arts.  Good 
work  was  done  in  poetry  and  drama,  history  and 
fiction,  painting,  sculpture,  and  journalism,  singing 
and  acting,  symphony  and  opera  and  song ;  and 
though  much  of  it  has  perished,  much  has  lived 
to  be  ranked  with  the  best  of  its  kind. 


It  is,  perhaps,  a  paradox  that  the  great  First 
Cause  of  Romanticism  was  Napoleon.  It  is  a  truth 
that,  if  he  were,    he  was   wholly   unconscious   of 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  7 

his  effect.  Beinj?  an  Italian,  he  was  also  in  his 
way  an  artist.  That  he  liked  good  acting,  and 
was  deeply  interested  in  the  theatre, 
is  shown  by  his  patronage  of  Talma  Napoleon 
and  Georges  and  Mars,  and,  above 
all,  by  his  famous  '  Decret  de  Moscon ' ;  that  he 
was  capable  of  having  an  opinion  of  his  own 
in  music,  by  his  squabbles  with  Cherubini  and 
his  patronage  of  Spontini  and  Lesueur.  He  could 
give  David  a  start  in  painting ;  he  may  be  said  to 
have  created  Gros ;  his  first  proceeding  after  the 
conquest  of  Italy  was  to  make  a  clean  sweep  of 
all  the  pictures  and  statues  in  the  Peninsula 
that  were  worth  stealing.  He  had  a  vigorous 
literary  instinct  and  a  notable  sense  of  style ; 
or  he  could  not  have  written  the  series  of 
bulletins  and  proclamations  which  Sainte-Beuve, 
if  I  remember  aright,  regarded  as  the  nearest 
thing  to  a  great  national  epic  in  the  literature 
of  France.  But  the  despot  in  him  had  pre- 
cedence of  the  artist ;  and  as  a  despot  he  had  no 
love  for  new  ideas  and  no  tolerance  for  intel- 
lectual independence.  He  cared  nothing  for 
Chateaubriand ;  Benjamin  Constant  he  dismissed 
and  disgraced  ;  he  snubbed  and  exiled  Mme.  de 
Stael.  That,  as  he  boasted,  he  would  have  made 
Corneille  a  senator  is  possible  ;  that  he  would  first 
of  all  have  muzzled  him  is  certain.  He  could 
turn  out  generals  and  administrators  by  the 
dozen ;    but    it  was   a   different  matter  when   he 


8  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

came  to  deal  with  art  and  artists.  His  reign 
was  not  altogether  barren  of  masterpieces,  it  is 
true :  for  him  Gros  painted  the  series  of  heroic 
pictures  which  includes  the  Pestiferes  de  Jaffa,  the 
Ahoukir,  and  the  decorations  in  the  cupola  of  the 
Pantheon  ;  under  his  auspices,  and  at  his  Acade'mie 
de  Musique  Spontini  produced  the  Vestale  and 
the  Fernand  Cortez,  and  Lesueur  his  Bardes ;  it 
was  to  a  public  of  his  subjects  that  Chateaubriand 
addressed  his  Atala  and  his  Genie  du  Christianisme , 
and  Mnie.  de  Stael  her  Corinne  and  her  memorable 
De  t Allemagne.  None  of  these  things  was  old- 
fashioned  :  on  the  contrary,  their  tendencies  were 
boldly  experimental ;  they  were  fresh  in  sentiment 
and  startling  in  effect.  But,  for  all  that,  so  far  as 
art  is  concerned,  the  France  which  was  handed 
over  to  the  Bourbons  after  Waterloo  had  the  look 
of  so  much  dead  land. 


As  exemplified  in  the  practice  of  the  great 
artists  of  the  past — in  the  tragedies  of  Corneille 
and  Racine,  the  comedies  of  Moliere 
The  Clansic  and  Regnard,  the  prose  of  Se'vigiie 
and  La  Bruyere,  the  familiar  verse 
of  Voltaire  and  La  Fontaine,  the  discourses  of 
Bossuet  and  Fe'nelon,  the  novels  of  Lesage,  the 
noble  canvases  of  Claude  and  the  Poussins,  the 
music    of  Gluck,    the   histrionics   of    Lecouvreur 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  9 

and  Baron  and  Lekain — the  classic  convention  is 
in  the  highest  degree  admirable.  Plainly  its 
essentials  are  dignity  of  style,  lucidity  in  expres- 
sion, reticence  and  elevation  of  sentiment;  plainly 
it  necessitates  the  cult  of  elegance  and  the  attain- 
ment of  sobriety  ;  plainly  it  is  incompatible  with 
the  mannerisms  which  are  offensive  because  they 
are  merely  personal.  The  reverse  of  the  medal  is 
less  pleasing.  The  classic  convention  is  as  easily 
abused  as  it  is  hard  to  handle  with  an  approach  to 
perfection.  Selection,  its  distinguishing  principle, 
can  only  be  exercised  with  profit  upon  material  at 
once  abundant  and  of  sterling  excellence.  Given 
a  man  of  genius  who  is  also  a  great  artist,  and 
we  get  such  results  as  C'inna,  and  Armide,  and 
the  Arcadia  ;  given  a  man  of  talent  who  is  also  an 
accomplished  craftsman,  and  we  have  to  be  content 
with  the  canvases  of  Girodet  and  the  alexandrines 
of  the  Abbe'  Delille.  In  the  early  Restora- 
tion Girodet  Mas  reckoned  a  master,  while  the 
memory  of  the  Abbe  Delille  was  cherished  by  all 
true  children  of  the  Muse.  Classicism,  in  fact, 
lay  on  the  arts  like,  not  a  bloom  but,  a  blight. 
It  was  the  official  faith.  It  wac  enthroned  at 
the  Academie,  it  governed  the  Theatre-Francais, 
it  possessed  the  Salon,  it  inspired  the  Press,  and 
through  the  Press  it  shaped  the  course  of  public 
opinion.  There  are  hints  of  it  in  Hugo's  earlier 
Odes,  in  Lamartine's  Meditations,  in  Gericault's 
strange  and  daring  masterpiece  itself. 


10  VIEWS  AND  IlEVIEAFS 

The   reforming'  inspiration   was,   not   developed 
but,  transmitted.     The  time  had  been  when,  as  an 
integral  part  of  French  influence,  the  classic  for- 
mula was  paramount  all  over  Europe. 
First  Causes   ^t        •  r  ^^        •  ^      ^ 

Now  it  was  fallen  nito  the  last  stage 

of  senile  decrepitude  even  in  France, 
while  in  Germany  and  England  it 
had  been  swept  Mtterly  away.  The  first  to  rise 
against  it  was  Germany,  where  the  modern  tend- 
ency had  achieved  what  is  so  far  its  most  heroic 
expression  in  the  instrumental  music  of  Beethoven, 
and  where  the  quest  of  other  perfections  than 
are  recognised  in  Boileau  and  La  Harpe  had 
resulted,  in  the  hands  of  such  men  as  Goethe  and 
Schiller,  Burger  and  Lessing  and  Tieck,  Uhland 
and  the  Schlegels,  in  the  creation  of  a  national 
literature.  In  England,  where  the  activity  of 
Shakespeare  and  Milton  had  never  been  altogether 
suspended,!  its  triumph,  thanks  largely  to  the 
teaching  of  the  Wartons,  the  example  of  Gray, 
and  the   admirable  work   of  Bishop    Percy,^   was 

1  Mr.  Walter  Raleigh  has  shown  us  of  late  (1900)  that 
to  the  misunderstanding  of  Milton's  aims  and  the  misuse 
of  Milton's  methods  we  are  indebted  for  all  the  poetic 
diction  and  most  of  the  intolerable  didactic  verse  which 
is  the  gift  of  the  Eighteenth  Century  to  English-speaking 
men.     [1901.] 

2  And  Horace  Walpole— I  suppose  he  also  did  his  part : 
though  The  Castle  of  Otranto  is  a  piddling  piece  of  super- 
nature,  and  The  Mysterious  Mother  is— but  how  to  qualify 
The  Mi/sterious  Mother  1  Yet  without  Horace  "Walpole 
we  should  probably  have  had  a  different  Mrs.  Radcliff. 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  11 

easy  and  rapid.  Goethe  had  owed  his  awaken- 
ing to  the  example  of  Shakespeare ;  and  it  was 
the  first-fruits  of  this  conjunction — the  Goetz  von 
Berlichiugcn  of  1771-3— that^  with  Iffland's  plays 
and  the  ballads  of  Biirger,  determined  the  destiny 
of  Walter  Scott^  and  so  called  into  action  the  fiery 
and  awakening  genius  of  Byron.  With  these  two 
at  workj  the  act  of  change  was  soon  accomplished. 
Of  course  they  did  not  stand  alone.  Beside  them 
were  Crabbe,  AV^ordsworth,  Keats,  and  Shelley  in 
poetry :  with  Hazlitt  and  Lamb  in  criticism, 
Coleridge  in  criticism  and  poetry,  Siddons  and 
Kean  in  histrionics,  and  Turner,  Constable,  and 
Lawrence  in  painting.  But  I  think  it  may  be  said, 
that  the  master  forces  of  the  Romantic  revival  in 
England,  and,  after  England,  the  most  of  Europe, 
were  Scott  and  Byron.  They  were  the  vulgarisers 
(as  it  were)  of  its  most  human  and  popular  tend- 
encies ;  and  it  is  scarce  possible  to  exaggerate  the 
importance  of  the  part  they  bore  in  its  evolution. 
In  their  faults  and  in  their  virtues,  each  was 
representative  of  one  or  other  of  the  two  main 
tendencies  of  his  time.  With  his  passion  for 
what  is  honourably  immortal  in  the  past,  his 
immense  and  vivid  instinct  of  the  picturesque,  his 
inexhaustible    humanity,    his    magnificent    moral 

and  Mrs.  RadclifiE  (it  is  well  known  and  established)  was 
useful  to  Byron — even  if  she  did  not  inspire  his  works.  So 
that  Horace  "Walpole,  against  his  will  or  not,  is,  he  also — 
he  the  Universal  Faddle  ! — a  precursor.     [1901.] 


12  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

health^  his  aboundinj^  and  infallible  sense  of  the 
eternal  realities  of  life,  Scott  was  an  inctarnation 
of  chivalrous  and  manly  duty ;  while  Byron,  with 
his  lofty  yet  engaging  cynicism,  his  passionate  re- 
gard for  passion,  his  abnormal  capacity  for  defiance, 
and  that  overbearing  and  triumphant  individuality 
which  made  him  one  of  the  greatest  elemental 
forces  ever  felt  in  literature — Byron  was  the  lovely 
and  tremendous  and  transcending  genius  of  revolt. 
Each  in  his  way  became  an  European  influence,  and 
between  them  they  made  Romanticism  in  France. 
The  men  of  1830,  it  is  true,  were  neither  deaf  to 
the  voices,  nor  blind  to  the  examples,  of  certain 
among  their  own  ancestors  :  Ronsard,  for  instance, 
and  the  poets  of  the  Pleiad,  Rousseau  and  Saint- 
Simon,  Andre'  Che'nier  and  Bernardin  de  Saint- 
Pierre,  Villon  and  Montaigne  and  Rabelais.  But 
it  is  a  principal  characteristic  of  them,  that  they 
were  anxiously  cosmopolitan.  They  quoted  more 
languages  than  they  knew.  They  were  on  inti- 
mate terms  with  all  the  names  in  the  aesthetic 
history  of  the  world.  They  boxed  the  compass 
for  inspiration,  and  drank  it  in  at  every  point 
upon  the  card  :  from  Goethe,  Schiller,  Hoffmann, 
Heine,  Iffland,  Beethoven,  Weber  in  Germany ; 
from  Dante,  Titian,  Rossini,  Piranesi,  Gozzi,  Ben- 
venuto  in  Italy  ;  from  Constable,  Turner,  Maturin, 
Lawrence,  Shakespeare,  Thomas  Moore  in  Eng- 
land ;  from  Calderon,  Goya,  Cervantes,  the  poets 
of  the  Romancero,  in  Spain.     But  all  these  were 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  13 

later  in  time  than  Byron  and  Scott,  or  were  found 
less    potent  and    less   moving  when  they   came. 
Thus,  the  Faust  of  Goethe  was  not  translated  until 
1823 ;  the  Eroica  of  Beethoven,  whose  work  was 
long  pronounced  incomprehensible  and  impossible 
of  execution,  was  only  heard  in  1828,  the  real  Frei- 
schiitz  some  thirteen  years  after  ;  while  Macready's 
revelation  of  Shakespeare,  till  then  (Voltaire  and 
Duels    and    the    Abbe    Prevost    notwithstanding) 
not  much    except    a    monstrous    and   mysterious 
name,   was  contemporaneous  with    Habeneck's  of 
Beethoven.     Scott  and  Byron,  on  the  other  hand, 
liad  but  to  be  known  to  be  felt,  and  they  were 
known  almost  at  once.     I  have  said  that  the  effect 
of  Romanticism  was  a  revolution  in  the  technique, 
the   material,  and   the  treatment  of  the   several 
arts.     I  do  not  think  I  affirm  too  much  in  adding 
that,  but  for  Scott  and  Byron,  the  revolution  would 
have  come  later  than  it  did,  and  would,  as  regards 
the  last  two,  have  taken  a  different  course  when  it 
came. 


As  in  England,  the  first  in  the  field  was  Scott. 
When  he  attended  the  Congress  of  Paris  in  1815  the 
fame  of  his  verse  had  preceded  him, 
and  his  novels  were  freely  imitated      Sir  Walter 
during    the    early    Restoration  :    he 
was   speedily  accessible  (181G-36)  in   translations 
—by  Martin,  Pichot,  and  Defauconpret— of  which 


14  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

some  fourteen  hundred  thousand  volumes  were 
sold  in  his  very  lifetime.  And  his  generous 
and  abounding  influence  was  felt  with  equal 
force  by  the  average  reader  and  the  pensive 
poet.  To  say  nothing  of  Cromwell,  which  may 
well  be  referable  in  some  sort  to  les  Puritains 
d' Ecosse  (which  is,  being  interpreted,  Old  Mortality), 
one  of  Hugo's  first  attempts  in  drama  was  an 
Amy  Rohsart  written  in  collaboration  with  Paul 
Foucher  ;  Op.  1.  of  Berlioz  is  a  Waverley  overture  ; 
subjects  from  Ivanhoe  and  Quentiii  Durward  occur 
with  pleasing  frequency  in  the  catalogue  of 
Delacroix  ;  the  origin  of  such  notable  departures 
in  romantic  prose  as  Notre-Dame,  the  Chronique  de 
Charles  IX.,  and  Isahelle  de  Baviere,  and  of  such 
achievements  in  romantic  verse  as  the  Pas  d' amies 
du  Roi  Jean,  is  patent.  Scott,  indeed,  was 
responsible  for  the  historical  element  in  Romanti- 
cism. He  taught  his  pupils  to  be  interested  in  the 
past,  to  admire  and  understand  the  picturesque 
in  ciiaracter  and  life,  to  look  for  romance  in 
reality,  and  turn  old  facts  to  new  and  brilliant 
uses.  He  was,  no  doubt,  the  Great  First  Cause 
of  '  le  jeune  homme  moyen-age,'  and  through  him 
of  a  dismal  phantasmagoria  of  castellans  and  high- 
born damozels,  of  rapiers  and  donjon  keeps  and 
long-toed  shoes ;  but  he  must  also  be  credited 
with  the  inspiration  of  not  a  little  of  what  is  best 
and  most  enduring  among  the  results  of  the 
Romantic  revolution. 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  15 

Nor  may  it  be  forgotten — in  truth,  it  cannot  be 

too    constantly   recalled — that    Romanticism    was 

above    all    an    effect   of   youth.      A 

The  Wicked 
characteristic     of    the     movement— 

,,11  1,    ,   f  1      •      Lord  B 

which  has  been  called     an  aesthetic 

barring-out '  —  was  the  extraordinary  precocity 
of  its  heroes.  The  Dante  et  VirgUe  and  the 
Radeau  de  la  Meduse,  the  Odes  et  ballades  and 
Hernani,  Antony  and  Henri  Trois  et  sa  cour,  Rolla 
and.  the  Nuits,  the  Symphonie  fantastique  and 
the  C'omedie  de  la  mort,  are  master-stuff  of  their 
kind,  and  are  all  the  work  of  men  not  thirty  years 
old.  Now,  Byron  is  pre-eminently  a  young  men's 
poet ;  and  upon  the  heroic  boys  of  1830 — greedy  of 
emotion,  intolerant  of  restraint,  contemptuous  of 
reticence  and  sobriety,  sick  with  hatred  of  the 
platitudes  of  the  official  convention,  and  prepared 
to  welcome  as  a  return  to  truth  and  nature  in- 
ventions the  most  extravagant  and  imaginings  the 
most  fantastic  and  far-fetched — his  effect  was  little 
short  of  maddening.  He  was  fully  translated  as 
early  as  1819-20 ;  and  the  modern  element  in 
Romanticism — that  absurd  and  curious  combina- 
tion of  vulgarity  and  terror,  cynicism  and  passion, 
truculence  and  indecency,  extreme  bad-hearted- 
ness  and  preposterous  self-sacrifice — is  mainly  his 
work.  You  find  him  in  Dumas's  plays,  in  Musset's 
verse,  in  the  music  of  Berlioz,  the  pictures  of 
Delacroix,  the  novels  of  George  Sand.  He  is  the 
origin  of  Antony  and   Rolla,   of  Indiana  and  the 


16  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

Massacre  de  Seio,  of  Berlioz's  Lelio  and  Frederick's 
Macaire  :  as  Scott  is  that  of  Bragelonne,  aud  the 
Croises  a  Constantinople,  and  Miclielet's  delightful 
history. 


As  regards  these  elements,  then,  Romanticism 
was    largely   an    importation.      As    regards   tech- 
nique— the  element  of  style — it  was 
Style  not.      Of   this    the    inspiration   was 

native  :  the  revolution  was  wrought 
from  within.  The  men  of  1880  were  craftsmen 
born :  they  had  the  genius  of  their  material. 
The  faculty  of  words,  sounds,  colours,  situations 
was  innate  in  them  :  their  use  of  it  is  always 
original  and  sound,  and  is  very  often  of  ex- 
emplary excellence.  It  is  hard  to  forgive — it  is 
impossible  to  overlook — the  vanity,  the  intemper- 
ance, the  mixture  of  underbred  effrontery  and  senti- 
mental affectation,  by  which  a  great  deal  of  their 
achievement  is  spoiled.  Such  qualities  are  "^most 
incident '  to  youth  ;  and  in  a  generation  drunk 
with  the  divinity  of  Byron  they  were  inevitable. 
Bad  manners,  however,  are  offensive  at  any  age, 
and  the  convinced  Romantique,  as  he  was  ail-too 
prone  to  make  a  virtue  of  loose  morals,  was  ail-too 
apt  to  make  a  serious  merit  of  unmannerliness. 
But  good  breeding  and  moral  perfectness  are  not 
what   one  expects  of  the  convinced  Romantique : 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  17 

what  we  ask  of  him — what  we  get  of  him  without 
asking — is  craftsmanship,  and  craftsmanship  of  the 
rare,  immortal  type.  Hugo  has  written  a  whole 
shelf  of  nonsense  ;  but  in  verse,  at  least,  his 
technical  imagination  was  Shakespearian.  The 
moral  tone  of  Antony  is  ridiculous;  but  it  remains 
the  most  complete  and  masterly  expression  of  some 
essentials  of  drama  which  the  century  has  seen. 
The  melodic  inspiration  of  (say)  Harold  en  Italie 
and  the  Messe  des  morts  may,  or  may  not,  be 
strained  and  thin  ;  but  if  only  his  orchestration  be 
considered,  the  boast  of  their  author,  '  J'ai  pris  la 
musique  instrumentale  ou  Beethoven  Fa  laissee,'  is 
found  to  be  neither  impudent  nor  vain.  In  a  sense, 
then,  it  is  fitting  enough  that  the  year  of  Hernani 
should  be  accepted  as  a  marking  date  in  the  story. 
If  it  have  nothing  else,  assuredly  Hernani  has 
style ;  and  the  eternising  influence  of  style  is 
such  that,  if  all  save  their  technical  achievement 
were  forgotten,  the  men  of  1830  would  still  be 
remembered  as  great  artists. 


The   revolution   triumphed,   and   with    reason ; 

but  its  triumph  was  very  far  from  being  absolute. 

It   proved    the    greater   Bomantiqites  ^ 

,  ,         .  Et  puts, 

to  be  men  of  singular  strength  and 

genius ;     it    cleared    the    air    or    a 

poisonous   mist   of  prejudice   and    affectation  ;  ou 

B 


18  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

every  hand  it  opened  up  new  paths,  and  discovered 
new  horizons ;  above  all,  it  discovered  a  dazzling 
world  of  novel  and  appropriate  material.  But  it 
did  not  demonstrate  the  inherent  and  intrinsic 
superiority  of  the  new  convention  to  the  old.  At 
this  point  the  argument  for  Romanticism  breaks 
down.  For  instance,  it  did  not  completely  con- 
quer the  public  esteem.  In  1831  the  receipts  of 
the  Theatre-Fran^ais  ran  down  one  night  to 
something  over  seventy  francs ;  in  1887,  when 
Bocage  and  Frederick  were  at  the  height  of  their 
fame,  they  ran  up  again  to  close  on  two  hundred 
sterling  a  night :  with  Rachel  on  the  stage  the 
classic  repertory — Corneille,  Racine,  even  Voltaire 
— was  found  as  great  and  moving  as  ever.  This 
was  in  the  heyday  of  the  movement,  and  I  give 
the  fact  for  what  it  is  worth.  But  apart  from 
the  popular  esteem,  something  may  be  said  for  the 
view  that  perhaps  the  most  perfect  of  all  the 
results  of  Romanticism  is  the  art  of  Corot,  in 
which  the  style  is  that  of  a  pupil  of  Claude, 
while  the  matter  is  that  of  an  inheritor  of 
Constable ;  and  the  cult  of  Corot  is  a  matter 
of  to-day.  It  remains  to  note  —  though  this 
is  rather  interesting  than  significant — that  the 
Romanticism  of  1830  was  never  an  official  success. 
The  rancour  and  the  infamy,  with  which  its 
beginnings  were  received,  are  in  strange  contrast 
with  the  good  temper  and  (on  the  whole)  the  fair- 
ness, which  marked  the  course  of  the  anti-classical 


) 

I 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  19 

movement  in  England^  where  Byron  was  the  spoiled 
child  of  Gifford,  and  there  was  none  much  readier 
than  Hazlitt  the  arch-radical  to  do  justice  upon 
the  arch-tory  Scott.  They  may  be  said  to  have 
pursued  it  until  the  end.  Dumas  was  never  of 
the  Academie^  nor  were  Gautier  and  Balzac,  while 
Barye  had  to  wait  for  the  distinction  till  he  was 
close  on  seventy  years  old.  Berlioz  was  rejected 
more  than  once,  and  so  was  Eugene  Delacroix  : 
only  because  they  knew  the  weight  and  the  value 
of  official  recognition  with  the  world,  did  they 
stoop  to  insist  upon  having  their  way.  Quite  late 
in  life  the  one  was  selling  his  pictures  for  a  few 
pounds  apiece,  while  the  other,  after  a  career  of 
obloquy  and  glory,  was  at  last  obliged  to  burke  his 
ideas  as  they  came,  lest  they  should  grow  into 
symphonies,  which  it  would  have  made  him  bank- 
rupt to  produce.  In  fact,  the  development  of  some 
brilliant  and  profiting  notorieties  notwithstand- 
ing, Romanticism  was  no  more  a  popular  than  an 
official  success. 


II 

Not  many  men  have  exercised  so  potent  and  so 
profound  an  influence  in  art  as  Louis  David.     His 
effect  upon  the  painter  of  the  Pentl- 
fercs  de  Jaffa  is  typical  of  his  authority  Gros 

in  life.     In  182;5,  David  being  then 
in  exile  at  Brussels,  Gros  was  at  the  very  top  of 


20  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

his  fame.  He  was  a  Baron,  a  Knight  of  the  Order 
of  Saint  Michael,  and  a  member  of  the  Institute  ; 
he  was  high  in  favour  with  the  King,  as  he  had 
been  with  the  Emperor ;  he  was  Professor  of 
Painting  at  the  Ecole  des  Beaux-Arts ;  he  had 
taken  over  David's  School,  and  was  known  for 
the  kindest  and  the  most  competent  of  teachers. 
Yet  it  is  told  of  him  that,  when  he  conveyed 
to  David  the  gold  medal  struck  in  honour  of 
the  master  by  his  former  pupils,  he  no  sooner 
caught  sight  of  the  house  in  which  the  old 
despot  had  taken  up  his  quarters  than  he  was 
seized  with  a  passion  of  terror  and  respect,  and 
had  to  sit  down  in  the  street,  and  collect  his 
spirits,  ere  he  could  bring  himself  to  knock  at 
the  door.  Nor  was  this  the  worst.  Gros  was  the 
earliest  of  the  Romantiques  :  he  had  formulated 
a  convention,  developed  a  style,  demonstrated  the 
possibilities  of  a  vast  amount  of  new  material,  and 
shown  the  way  to  regions  unknown  or  inaccessible 
before ;  his  greater  works  had  taken  rank  with 
the  masterpieces  of  the  French  school ;  yet  when 
David  wrote  to  him,  that  he  was  to  give  over 
the  painting  of  buttons  and  cocked  hats,  look  up 
his  Plutarch,  and  enrich  the  world  with  a  real 
historical  picture,  he  obeyed  his  instructions  to 
the  letter,  and  returned  in  all  simplicity  and  good 
faith  to  the  practice  of  the  Heroic  Nude.  He  was 
reviled  as  a  renegade,  and  denounced  as  a  re- 
actionary ;    the   revolution   he   had    initiated    was 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  21 

triumphing  all  along  the  line;  he  ceased  to  be 
able  to  sell  his  pictures.  But,  though  David  was 
dead,  he  went  on  conning  his  Plutarch,  and  paint- 
ing exactly  as  he  would  have  done  had  David 
been  at  his  elbow.  In  the  June  of  1835,  after  a 
last  colossal  failure  at  the  Salon,  he  drowned 
himself  in  the  Seine.  That,  however,  was  only 
the  end  of  the  man.  The  artist  had  committed 
suicide  some  fourteen  years  before,  and  had  done  it 
by  David's  orders. 


With  Classicism  as  the  official  cult,  and  a  dis- 
ciplinarian of  the  stamp  of  David  in  authority,  the 
chance  of  heresy,  it  might  be  thought, 
was  insignificant.     But  in  truth  the  David 

beginnings  of  Romanticism  were 
easy,  in  all  the  arts.  At  the  inception  of  the 
movement  the  expression  of  heterodox  views  was 
the  reverse  of  unwelcome.  In  literature  the  success 
of  Atala  was  instant  and  complete;  in  music  the 
experiments  of  Spontini  and  Lesueur  were  con- 
sidered with  enthusiasm  ;  it  was  not  otherwise 
in  painting,  though  here  the  iron  will  of  David, 
his  intense  and  rigid  personality,  his  fine  crafts- 
manship, and  his  immense  authority,  were  felt 
as  vigorous  immediate  influences.  He  had  started 
as    an    imitator    of    Boucher ;    had    studied    the 


22  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

antique  in  Rome  (1775-80)  under  Vien  ;  had  re* 
turned  to  Paris  an  incarnation  of  that  interest  in 
the  work  of  the  Greeks  and  Romans  among  whose 
first  fruits  is  the  Laocoon  of  Lessing  ;  had  painted 
the  Belisaire,  the  Serment  des  Horaces,  the  Mort  de 
Socrate ;  and  had  so  completely  stayed  the  move- 
ment of  French  art  that  his  pupils  (it  is  said)  made 
studies  on  the  hack  of  stray  canvases  and  drawings 
signed  hy  Antoine  Watteau.  That  solemn  mockery 
of  things  antique^  which  was  a  characteristic  of  the 
Revolution,  appeared  to  him  in  the  light  of  a  living, 
dominating  reality.  lie  carried  it  from  painting 
into  politics,  and  back  again  from  politics  into 
painting ;  he  believed  in  it  as  the  outward  and 
visible  sign  of  civic  and  artistic  virtue  ;  much  of  its 
vogue  with  the  general  may  be  attributed  to  his 
personal  influence  and  example.  The  suppression 
of  the  Academie  de  Peinture  was  largely  his  work, 
as  were  a  number  of  changes  and  reforms  besides ; 
he  began,  but  never  finished,  an  enormous  picture 
of  the  Session  of  the  Tennis  Court, — 'famed 
St'anca  du  Jcu  de  Paumc,'  as  Carlyle  calls  the 
business;  he  was  responsible,  among  other  abomina- 
tions in  pasteboard  or  in  plaster,  for  the  hideous 
and  colossal  allegory  which — '  imposante  par  son 
caractere  de  force  et  de  simplicite' — should  re- 
present, to  the  admiration  of  all  good  patriots, 
'^I'image  du  peuple  Fran^ais  'defying  the  world 
from  a  pedestal  composed  of  'les  effigies  des  rois 
et  les    de'bris    de    leurs  vils    attributs '  ;   he   was 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  23 

master  of  the  revels  to  the  Republic  and  gentleman- 
usher  to  the  newly  elected  Supreme  Being  ;  in  a 
style  and  temper  which  may  be  said  to  have  made 
him  a  Roniantiquc  before  the  fact,  he  painted  the 
posthumous  portraits  of  Lepelletier  Saint-Fargeau 
and  Marat ;  he  idolised  Robespierre,  with  whom  he 
offered  (publicly)  to  share  the  Socratic  hemlock. 
After  the  Oth  Thermidor  he  was  violently  de- 
nounced in  the  Convention  ;  stigmatized  as  a  '  vile 
usurper '  and  a  '  despot  of  the  arts '  ;  suspended 
from  his  service  on  the  Committees  ;  arrested  more 
than  once,  and  kept  in  durance  for  months  at  a 
time  ;  and  saw  liis  Marat  ejupirant  and  his  Lepelletier 
removed  in  infamy  from  their  place  in  the  Pantheon. 
But  at  last  he  regained  his  liberty,  and  in  no  great 
while  he  had  regained  his  credit.  He  painted 
his  Enlevement  de.s  Sabines ;  he  was  made  a  member 
of  the  Institute  ;  his  studio — from  which,  at  one 
time  or  another,  he  sent  out  such  disciples  as  Gros, 
Ingres,  Drouais,  Gerard,  the  elder  Isabey,  Schnetz, 
Granet,  Girodet,  Rude,  Gudin,  David  d'Angers,  and 
Leopold  Robert — was  thronged  with  pupils.  His 
rivals  were  also  his  imitators ;  his  ascendancy  was 
so  real,  and  his  dictatorship  so  absolute  that  Prud'- 
hon,  as  late  as  1810,  was  obliged  to  change  his 
style,  and  paint  an  heroic  allegory  for  the  Salon  : 
'pour  obtenir,'  says  Delescluze,  'la  faveur  d'etre 
place  au  nonibre  de  ce  qu'on  appelle  les  peiutres 
d'histoire.' 


24  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

But  if  David  was  strong,  Napoleon  was  stronger. 

It   was   a   feature    in   his   campaign    against    the 

future  that  his  work  should  receive 
A  Gascon  ,         ^         .  .     .  , 

an    adequate    pictorial     expression ; 

and  David,  whom  he  met  and  sub- 
jugated at  the  outset  of  his  career, 
was  among  the  means  he  used  to  his  end.  He 
began  by  sitting  to  the  painter  for  two  portraits  :  one 
the  magnificent  sketch  (unfinished)  of  the  General 
of  the  Army  of  Italy ;  the  other  that  one  of 
the  First  Consul  on  horseback  which  is  known 
as  Napoleon  Crossing  the  Alps.  Afterwards  he 
appointed  David  his  painter  in  ordinary  ;  obliged 
him  to  remember  that  he  was  the  artist  of  the 
Marat  expirant  and  the  Serment  du  Jeu  de  paume 
as  well  as  of  the  Sabines  and  the  Belisaire ;  ordered 
him  out  of  the  world  of  sculpture-in-paint  he 
lived  to  represent,  and  made  him  put  aside  his 
Leonidas,  and  set  to  work  on  the  Couronnement  de 
Napoleon  and  the  Distribution  des  Aigles.  David 
was  a  born  tyrant,  but  hero-worship  was  a  neces- 
sary of  his  life.  He  adored  Napoleon,  as  he 
had  adored  Marat  and  Robespierre.  He  could 
refuse  his  idol  nothing.  He  appears  to  have 
uttered  not  so  much  as  a  murmur  against  the 
popularity  of  those  pictures  of  buttons  and  cocked 
hats  with  which,  during  year  after  year  of  the 
Empire  the  Salon  was  crowded.  It  was  not  until 
his  idol  and  himself  were  banished  men,  and  the 
splendid    pageant    of  Napoleonism  had   vanished 


NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  25 

like  a  dream,  that  he  took  up  his  testimony  against 
them,  and  reminded  his  old  pupil  that  the  way  to 
salvation  lay  through  Plutarch. 


David's  concessions  were,  however,  as  those  of 

one  royalty  to  another  and  greater.      It  was  far 

otherwise  with  Gros.      Without  the 

Dfi  FoTti 
Napoleonic  inspiration  he  might  never 

,     .       ,  .  .   .     ,.,  ,,  Dulccdo 

have  deviated  into  originality  at  all. 

A  favourite  with  his  master  and  with  Mme.  Vige'e- 

Lebrun,  he  had  escaped,  with  David's  help,  from 

the  Paris  of  the  Terror,  and  betaken  himself  to  the 

Italy  of  the  First  Campaign  :  and  at  Milan  he  had 

fallen  in  with  Josephine.      It  was  the  beginning  of 

fame   and   fortune.     Josephine  was  too   generous 

and  impulsive  to  do  good  by  halves.     She  took  up 

the  young  painter   with   enthusiasm ;   introduced 

him  to  her  husband ;  got  him  commissions — the 

Bonaparte  a  la  bataille  d'Arcole  among  them  ;  and 

ended  by  making  him  one  of  the  Committee  of 

Selection    appointed   to    furnish    Paris    with    the 

treasures  of  P'lorence  and  Rome.    One  consequence 

of  this  function  was  that  Gros  became  a  worshipper 

of  Michelangelo  ;   another  that  he  served  under 

Masseua  in  the  Defence  of  Genoa,  and  saw  war 

face  to  face.     Returning   to  Paris  (1801),  he  was 

chosen   to   paint  for  the   State   a   picture  of  the 


26  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

Battle  of  Nazareth.  Tlie  work  was  begun^  but 
never  finished.  It  would  necessarily  have  been  an 
apotheosis  of  Junot,  and  the  First  Consul,  who 
had  his  own  opinion  as  to  the  unique  and  proper 
subject  for  such  distinctions,  was  not  slow  to 
cancel  the  commission.  He  replaced  it  by  another, 
with  a  theme  in  which  he  took  an  interest  of 
a  different  kind ;  and  in  1804  Gros  exhibited 
the  famous  Pestiferes  do  Jaffa.  Its  effect  was 
triumphant :  it  was  hung  round  with  laurel  and 
palm ;  it  was  purchased  for  the  State  for  as  much 
as  16,000  francs — in  those  days  a  magnificent 
sum ;  the  painters,  Vien  and  David  at  their 
head,  gave  a  banquet  in  its  honour.  Its  success 
was  deserved  :  it  invested  an  act  of  life  with  heroic 
dignity,  and  it  did  this  by  means  of  a  presentment 
of  the  truth,  imaginative  indeed,  but  literal  and 
direct  enough  to  convey  an  intense  suggestion 
of  reality ;  it  was  eminently  personal  in  subject, 
treatment,  and  style,  and  it  was  also  a  revelation 
of  material.  Its  tendencies  were  accentuated,  and 
its  conclusions  were  stated  more  resolutely,  and 
in  some  sort  more  brilliantly,  in  the  Aboukir  of 
1806  and  in  the  Eylau  of  1809,  the  one  a  picture 
of  war  in  the  act,  the  other  of  war  as  it  looks 
next  day.  It  was  impossible  that  such  work  should 
not  inspire  a  vast  amount  of  experiment  and 
change  :  the  sentiment  was  too  novel  and  affecting, 
the  material  too  rich,  the  effect  too  striking  and 
complete.     In  the  Pestiferes — the  Atala  of  painting 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTKJISM  27 

—  Romauticism  was  formulated  and  suggested  ; 
with  the  Aboukir  and  the  Eylau  it  became  inevit- 
able. Gros,  as  we  have  seen,  was  presently  to 
deny  his  work  and  go  over  to  the  enemy  :  he  was 
weak  of  will,  too,  and  deficient  in  self-confidence, 
and  it  is  doubtful  if  he  realised  the  value,  or 
perceived  the  possibilities,  of  his  discovery.  But 
the  inspiration  of  which,  whether  consciously 
or  not,  he  had  been  the  vehicle,  had  already 
passed  into  the  common  stock.  Ten  years  after 
the  Eylau  Gericault,  who  had  forced  his  way  to 
the  front  as  early  as  1812,  exhibited  the  Radeau 
de  la  Meduse.  Like  his  friend  and  fellow-worker, 
Delacroix,  whose  Dante  et  Virgile  was  itself  but 
four  years  off,  Gericault  was  a  pupil  of  Gue'rin,  but 
a  follower  of  Gros.  Plainly,  therefore,  the  influ- 
ence of  Gros  was  creative  as  well  as  quickening. 
The  inception  of  the  movement  was  his ;  and  it 
was  also  his  to  determine  the  direction  of  the  most 
active  and  potent  agencies  of  its  second  phase. 


Gericault  had  lived  and  worked  in  England  (it  is 

told  of  him,  that  he  was  profoundly  impressed  by 

the     great     romantic    landscape    of 

Turner) ;    he   was  splendidly   gifted 

and  admirably  trained ;  he  was  full 

DdcL  c  7*0  ijc 
of  daring,  energy,  ambition,  a  born 

leader  of  men.     But  he  died  at  thirty-three,  his 


28  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

work — though  he  had  done  enough  for  fame — no 
more  than  begun,  his  measure  only  indicated  ;  and 
the  conduct  of  the  movement,  which  had  by  this 
time  become  militant  and  progressive,  devolved 
upon  his  friend  and  disciple  Eugene  Delacroix.  In 
line  with  him  were  artists  of  the  stamp  of  Bonington 
(another  Gros  man)  and  Decamps,  Scheffer  and 
Delaroche,  Boulanger  and  Deveria,  and  in  another 
branch  of  painting  Isabey,  Huet,  Troyon,  and 
Camille  Flers.  They  were  good  men  in  their 
way,  and  they  did  good  work,  each  after  his  kind. 
But  the  strongest  and  the  most  representative 
of  all  was  Delacroix  ;  and,  by  virtue  no  less  of 
his  qualities  than  of  his  aims,  he  was  soon  the 
chief  of  the  advance.  But  while  he  was  the 
hero  of  tlie  rebel  camp,  he  was  the  horror  of  the 
other.  His  first  picture  had  the  honour  to  be 
described  as  the  work  of  a  drunken  broom  ;  his 
second  was  denounced  as  a  deliberate  attempt  to 
establish  the  divinity  of  the  Ugly  ;  he  got  a  com- 
mission from  the  Chief  of  the  State,  and  he  was 
requested  to  make  the  work  as  unlike  a  Delacroix 
as  possible;  his  famous  '  Voila  trente  ans  queje 
suis  livre'  aux  betes '  is  but  a  plain  account  of  his 
career.  The  reason  is  not  far  to  seek.  For  one 
thing  his  message  was  original  and  disturbing,  and 
for  another  his  manner  of  utterance  was  singularly 
individual  and  new. 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  29 

The  natural  bias  of  the  Romantique  is  towards 

exaggeration  and  irrelevance.      He  must  suggest 

too  much,  or  he  cannot  believe  that 

.  The 

he  has   said    enough :    he   bewilders 

by  sheer  expressiveness.  With  Dela- 
croix the  aim  and  the  end  of  painting 
was  the  representation  of,  not  beauty  but,  emotion. 
Like  most  of  the  men  of  his  generation,  he  held, 
at  least  in  the  beginning,  that  passion  must  be 
not  measurable,  careful  of  form,  attentive  to 
deportment,  eternally  conscious  of  good  breed- 
ing, but  simply  passionate — passionate  above  all, 
passionate  at  any  cost — and  that  nature  is  natural 
in  proportion  as  it  is  violent.  His  sincerity  was 
unimpeachable,  and  he  worked  out  his  conviction 
as  only  a  man  of  genius  can.  But  to  see  that  his 
art  was  great  was  given  only  to  a  few,  while  it  was 
obvious  to  the  many  that  the  immediate  eifect  of 
his  visions  of  battle  and  murder  and  despair  was 
the  reverse  of  anodyne.  Moreover,  bis  style  was 
one  that  lent  itself  to  caricature.  His  qualities 
remained  inimitable,  but  to  practise  his  defects 
was  easy  ;  and  it  came  to  pass  that  loose  drawing 
was  quoted  "as  a  characteristic  of  style,  and  false 
colour  as  a  sign  of  genius,  while  a  horrible  subject 
was  a  proof  of  poetry.  '  Le  romantisme  mal 
entendu,'  Heine  wrote  in  1881,  'a  infecte'  les 
ateliers  de  France ;  en  consequence  du  principe 
fondamental  de  cette  doctrine  chacun  s'efforce  de 
peindre  autrement  que  les  autres,  on,  pour  purler  le 


30  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

langage  a  la  mode,  de  /aire  sortir  son  individualite.' 
Five  years  after  came  the  famous  Salon  of  1836. 
The  Classics  awoke  to  a  sense  of  the  position,  and 
realised,  confusedly  but  with  a  certain  vividness, 
that  Romanticism — like  Impressionism  yesterday 
— was  often  another  name  for  ig-norance  and  a 
standing  apology  for  ineptitude.  They  were  in 
office,  of  course  ;  and  confounding  good  with  bad, 
the  reality  and  the  sham,  they  resolved  to  strike 
pro  oris  et  focis — for  careful  drawing  and  decorous 
colour.  They  shut  and  barred  their  doors  upon 
Rousseau  ;  they  rejected  work  by  Delacroix,  Huet, 
Marilhat,  the  sculptor  of  the  Lion  ecrasant  un  boa. 
And  it  must  be  owned  that  their  exasperation, 
however  crudely  and  intemperately  expressed,  was 
not  ill-founded. 


The  chosen  field  of  Romanticism  in  this  stage  of 
its  development  was  drama.  The  movement  was 
professedly  a  return  to  nature  in 
le  Drame  general  ;  the  drama  was,  past  all 
whooping,  a  return  to  human  nature 
in  particular.  Alfred  de  Vigny  was  the  poet 
of  Chatterton  ;  when  you  said  '  Dumas '  you  said 
Henri  Trois,  you  said  Antony,  you  .said  la  Tour 
de  Nesle ;  it  was  Hugo's  to  follow  up  Hernani 
with  Marion  Delorme,  and  Marion   Delorme  with 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  31 

le  Rot  s'amuse  and  Lucrece  Borgia.  And  their 
interpreters  were  Dorval  and  Georges,  were  Fre- 
derick and  Firmin  and  Bocage.  And  the  drama 
was  humanity  in  action,  with  costume  and  scenery, 
and  the  actor's  face,  the  actor's  figure,  the  actor's 
gesture  and  port  and  prestance,  an  incessant, 
irresistible  appeal  to  the  eye.  What  wonder, 
then,  if  pictures  also  were  drama  ?  if  the  current 
emotion-in-chief  C^  Ah  !  par  la  mort ! '  .  .  .  '^Sang 
du  Christ,  c'est  son  amant  V  .  .  .  '  Seigneur,  tu 
es  un  fier  coquin  !'...'  Et  que  cette  bonne  lame 
de  Tolede  .  .  .  !')  found  itself  expressed  in  the 
terms  of  paint  ?  if,  in  so  many  words,  Ge'ricault, 
Delacroix,  Horace  Vernet,  Ary  Scheifer,  Charlet, 
Decamps,  Boulanger,  Gigoux,  the  Johannots  and 
Deverias,  RafFet  and  Daumier  and  Gavarni,  were 
all  artists  in  the  figure?  and  if  it  was  in  figure 
painting  that  the  first  great  victories  were  gained  ? 


In  the  field  of  landscape,  where  the  noblest  work 
was  to  be  done,  there  was  not  at  first  much 
fighting.     The  ambition  was  not  yet 

popular  ;  the  sentiment  had  still  to 

,  J.     i.  a.1  1  Landscape 

become  a  part  of  the  general   con- 
sciousness.      The    style    in    vogue    was    that    of 
Valenciennes,    who    was    born    two    years    after 
David,  and  who  achieved  in  landscape  a  parallel 


32  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

reform  to  that  effected  by  Vien  and  his  notable 
pupil  in  the  pictorial  treatment  of  the  figure.     He 
classicised  the  art^  that  is  :  obliterating  the  traces 
alike  of  Watteau  and  of  Joseph  Vernet,  he  laid  out 
the  world  in  backgrounds  for  a  populace  of  heroes 
and    heroines    improved    from    Plutarch's   by   an 
earnest  course  of  second-rate  French  tragedy.    The 
result  was  learned  and  pompous  :  it  had  the  true 
geometrical  feeling,  and  was  rich  in  archaeological 
emphasis  and  the  eloquence  of  perspective.      But 
it  was  also  jejune,  insignificant,   and  profoundly 
dull.    At  the  worst  of  times  the  effect  of  such  work 
as  (say)  the  Valenciennes  in  the  Louvre — Ciceron, 
etant     questeur     eii    Sicile,     dccouvre     le    tombeau 
d'Archimede,  que  les  Syracusains  assuraient  ne  pas 
posseder  sur  leur  territoire  is  its  highly  respectable 
name  —  could    not   have    been   exciting.      Valen- 
ciennes and  his  followers,  indeed,  were  only  the 
small  change  of  Claude  and  the  Poussins  ;  and  the 
public  was  so  far  indifferent  to  their  results  that  it 
was  not  at  once  seduced  into  knowing  or  caring 
anything  about  tlie  proceedings  of  their  assailants. 
Landscape  is  not  a  natural  intoxicant.     That  ex- 
periments in  the  use  of  such  material  as  the  facts 
of  massacre  and  shipwreck  were  passionately  ad- 
mired, and  as  passionately  resented,   is  not  sur- 
prising :  they  belong  to  experience,  they  are  a  part 
of  the  fabric  of  life,  their  interest   is  dreadfully 
suggestive.     To  do  as  much  with  effects  of  light, 
and  studies  of  cloud,  and  reminiscences  of  Asnieres 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  33 

and  Montmartre,  was  manifestly  impossible.  The 
material  was  uninteresting,  being-  unfamiliar  ;  the 
humanity  was  too  purely  subjective  to  be  imme- 
diately apparent.  Accordingly,  the  beginnings  of 
Romanticism  in  landscape  were  quiet  and  prosperous 
enough.  Isabey  exhibited  at  twenty,  and  gained 
a  First  Class  medal  with  his  first  picture;  Huet 
was  medalled  at  twenty-nine,  Troyon  at  twenty- 
five,  Camille  Roqueplan  at  twenty,  Jules  Dupre  at 
twenty-two ;  Corot  broke  ground  at  the  Salon 
of  1827,  and  never  missed  an  exhibition  till  his 
death. 


The   intention    of    French    landscape    had    all 
along  been  mainly  decorative.     The  formula  was 
found  almost  at  starting,  and  in  the 
hands  of  Nicolas  Poussin  (1594-1665),      ^^-^^^^  ""^ 
Claude      Gelle'e     (1600-1682),      and  ^^^^'^ 

Gaspard  Dughet  (1613-1676),  a  culmination  was 
attained  which  is  comparable  in  its  way  to 
Raphael's  design  and  the  painting  of  Velasquez. 
It  may  be  described  as  a  presentment,  essentially 
imaginative  and  heroic,  of  some  greater  aspects 
and  some  broader  truths  of  nature.  It  is  an 
art  of  luminous  dawns  and  solemn  dusks ;  its 
aerial  architecture  is  vast  in  design  and  largely 
accurate  in  fact ;  its  essentials  are  majesty  of 
line,    harmony    of  parts,    dignity   of  conception, 


34  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

and  a  grandiose  simplicity  of  sentiment  and  effect. 
It  gave  an  ideal  to  art,  and  the  strength  of  its 
example  is  not  yet  departed.  But  it  had  little  to 
do  with  the  common,  work-a-day  world  whose 
pictorial  quality,  as  perceived  and  developed  by 
Rubens  (1577-1040),  is  the  material  of  modern 
landscape ;  and  in  France,  where  the  realistic 
theory  was  not  permitted  to  take  root,  and 
where  in  times  comparatively  recent  the  simple 
and  passionate  experiments  of  Georges  Michel 
(17C3-1842)  were  entirely  ignored,  its  effect  upon 
art  was  the  reverse  of  fortunate.  In  the  work 
of  Watteau  (1684-1721),  the  landscape  element, 
for  all  its  suggestiveness,  its  mystery  and  charm, 
is  an  accessory ;  in  that  of  Boucher  (1704-1770)  and 
liis  following,  its  function  is  unchanged,  if  its 
magic  be  departing ;  with  Joseph  Vernet  (1714- 
1789),  a  pupil  of  the  Italian  pupils  of  Claude  and 
Caspar,  it  began  to  be  once  more  painted  for 
itself,  and  to  be  touched  with  a  serious  spirit  of 
observation  and  inquiry  ;  with  Valenciennes  (1760- 
1819)  and  his  tribe — Bidault,  Michallon,  Bertin, 
Aligny,  and  the  rest  —  and  the  development  of 
the  paysage  historique,  it  lost,  as  I  have  said,  all 
touch  with  life,  and  fell,  as  it  seemed,  into  a  state 
of  hopeless  anecdotage.  At  this  time,  indeed, 
landscape  was  at  its  lowest  almost  everywhere. 
The  Italian  school  was  dead  of  emphasis  and 
affectation  ;  in  Flanders  the  seed  of  Rubens  and 
the  posterity  of   Breughel  (1568-1626)  had   both 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  35 

passed  utterly  away ;  in  Holland,  where  the 
naturalistic  principle  had  passed  from  culmina- 
tion to  culmination  in  the  work  of  Van  Goyen 
(1596-lGGG),  Cuyp  (1605-1691),  Remhrandt  (1607- 
1669),  Ruysdael  (1625-1682),  Hobhema  (1638- 
1709),  there  was  now  the  silence  of  the  void. 
Only  in  England  was  there  anything  of  the 
ardour  and  the  stress  of  life.  There  two  noble 
influences  had  developed  :  one  the  tranquil  and 
lovely  art  of  Wilson  (1714-1782),  the  most  com- 
plete and  graceful  expression  of  the  Claude  con- 
vention in  existence ;  the  other,  the  brilliant 
and  suggestive  art  of  Gainsborough  (1727-1788). 
Both  were  far  in  the  past ;  but  during  the  first 
quarter  of  the  present  century  the  men  who 
had  arisen  in  their  room  were  doing  greatly  as 
they.  Crome  (1769-1821)  was  following  with 
singular  strength,  intelligence,  and  originality 
the  lead  of  Meindert  Hobbema,  and  in  found- 
ing the  Norwich  School — Cotman,  Vincent,  John 
Crome,  Stark,  and  the  others — had  established 
a  new  centre  of  activity ;  Girtin  (1775-1802) 
and  Cozens  (1752-1799)  had  given  a  fresh  start 
to  water-colours ;  the  astonishing  and  eccen- 
tric genius  of  Turner  (1775-1851)  was  in  mid- 
career;  Constable  (1776-1835)  had  found  a  new 
departure  and  developed  a  peculiar  inspiration  ; 
Thomson  of  Duddingston  (1778-1840)  was  renew- 
ing and  reinspiring  the  heroic  convention  of  the 
Poussins   by    bringing   it  into  nearer   touch  with 


36  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

nature,  and  informing  it  with  his  own  sincere  and 
ardent  individuality  ;  it  was  the  epoch  of  De  Wint 
(1784-1849),  David  Cox  (1785-1859),  Copley  Field- 
ing (1787-1855),  Collins  (1780-1847),  Harding 
(1798-1863),  to  name  but  these.  England  had 
been  the  last  to  catch  the  spark.  It  was  reserved 
for  her  to  do  with  French  landscape  as  with  French 
literature,  and  count  for  not  a  little  in  the  royalty 
of  some  of  the  kings  of  the  art.  And  the  chief 
agent  in  the  work  was  Constable. 


The  thing,  no  doubt,  was  in  the  air.  Romanti- 
cism was  a  return  to  more  than  human  nature, 
after  all.  The  tradition  of  J.- J. 
Constable  Rousseau  and  Bernardin  de  Saint- 
Pierre  and  the  practice  of  Scott 
and  Byron  and  Chateaubriand  were  making  the 
landscape  element  an  essential  part  of  litera- 
ture ;  and  in  painting  the  example  of  Rubens  and 
the  greater  Dutchmen  was  found  in  intimate 
alliance  with  the  authority  of  the  Englishman 
Bonington  and  the  initiative  of  the  Frenchman 
Ge'ricault.  When  in  1822  Paul  Huet  entered 
the  atelier  of  Baron  Gros,  he  had  already  painted 
for  at  least  two  years  in  the  open  air,  and 
knew  the  Ile-Seguin  as  it  were  by  heart.  Huet 
was    only   one    of  many ;   so   that  when   sowing- 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  37 

time  came,  and  the  sower  came  with  it,  the 
ground  was  well  and  widely  prepared.  How 
widely  and  how  well  was  shown  by  the  famous 
Salon  of  1824.  Among  the  exhibitors  were  Bon- 
ington,  Lawrence,  Thales  and  Copley  Fielding, 
Harding,  Wild,  and  Constable.  Lawrence  re- 
ceived the  red  ribbon ;  and  gold  medals  were 
awarded  to  Bonington  and  Copley  Fielding,  who 
were  represented,  the  one  by  five  pictures  and 
drawings,  the  other  by  no  less  than  nine.  But 
the  success  was  the  Constables.  They  were  three 
in  number,  the  chief  of  them  being  the  Hay 
Wain  (originally  purchased  with  two  others  for 
£250),  presented  some  years  since  to  the  National 
Gallery  by  Mr.  Henry  Vaughan  ;  and  the  fury  of 
discussion  with  which  they  were  received  was  such 
as  to  reach  the  ears  and  flatter  the  idiosyncrasy 
of  the  painter  himself,  though  (as  one  who  gloried 
in  the  name  of  Briton)  he  regarded  the  excite- 
ment of  his  hosts  with  a  feeling  of  fine,  solid, 
good-humoured  contempt.  He  received  a  gold 
medal ;  his  pictures,  which  at  starting  appear  to 
have  been  badly  hung,  were  removed  to  '  prime 
places  in  the  principal  room  ' ;  their  effect — with 
that  of  The  White  Horse,  exhibited  next  year 
at  Lille  and  elsewhere — was  equally  vivid  and 
profound. 

In  England  a  respectable  failure  then  and  for 
many  years  to  come.  Constable,  at  this  time  a 
man  of  eight-and-forty,  was  in  the  plentitude  of 


38  VIEWS  AND  REV1P:WS 

liis  genius  and  accomplishment :  his  theory  was 
not  less  individual  and  sound  than  his  practice, 
notwithstanding  a  certain  lack  of  feeling  for 
elegance  in  the  use  of  paint,  was  masterly.  His 
merit  was  twofold.  He  had  looked  long  at  truth 
with  no  man's  eyes  but  his  own  :  and  having 
caught  her  in  the  act,  he  had  recorded  his  ex- 
perience in  terms  so  personal  in  their  masculine 
directness  and  sincerity  as  to  make  his  leading  irre- 
sistible. Never  till  his  time  had  so  much  pure 
nature  been  set  forth  in  art.  He  showed  that  the 
sun  shines,  that  the  wind  blows,  that  water  wets, 
that  clouds  are  living,  moving  citizens  of  space, 
that  grass  is  not  brown  mud,  that  air  and  light 
are  everywhere,  that  the  trunks  of  trees  are  not 
disembodied  appearances,  but  objects  with  solidity 
and  surface  and  a  place  in  their  aerial  environ- 
ment. He  proved  beyond  dispute,  that  the  ton- 
ality of  a  landscape  is  none  the  worse  for  corre- 
sponding with  something  actually  felt  as  existing 
in  the  subject,  and  that  the  colours  of  things  are 
not  less  representative  than  their  textures  and 
their  forms.  He  demonstrated,  once  for  all, 
the  eternal  principles  of  generalisation,  and  that 
a  picture  lacking  in  the  sense  of  weather  and  the 
feeling  for  mass  :  a  picture,  too,  in  which  the 
small  truths  of  a  scene  are  preferred  before  its 
larger  and  more  characteristic  elements :  is  so 
little  in  sympathy  with  any  romantic  or  poetic 
view  of  nature  as  to  have  no  existence  save  as  a 


A  NOTE  ON  ROMANTICISM  39 

more  or  less  pleasing  pattern.  In  fact  he  was 
found  to  have  carried  the  realistic  ideal  to  a 
point  so  far  ahead  of  the  farthest  reached  hy  any 
of  his  predecessors,  that  his  results,  and  the 
convention  on  which  he  achieved  them,  were 
practically  new.  \Vhat  was  more,  they  were 
new  in  the  right  way  and  to  the  right  purpose. 
They  tended  to  the  cult  of  sincerity  in  observation 
and  expression  ;  they  showed  the  use  of  a  com- 
plete equipment ;  they  foreshadowed  a  world  of 
possibilities,  the  right  of  way  through  which 
was  only  to  be  won  by  close  and  patient  inter- 
course with  nature.  They  suggested  an  art, 
which  should  deal  broadly  with  man's  impres- 
sions of  natural  appearances  :  with  weather,  atmo- 
sphere, distance,  the  Sky  in  its  relation  to  the 
Earth,  the  Earth  in  her  subjection  to  the  Sky : 
and  their  correspondence  with  his  moods.  They 
were  the  beginnings,  in  short,  of  Romanticism  in 
landscape.  They  did  for  it  what  Scott's  novels 
and  Byron's  verse  had  done,  or  were  doing,  for 
fiction  and  poetry  and  the  drama.  They  were  the 
inspiration  of  what  is  fast  coming  to  be  recognised 
as  the  loftiest  expression  of  modern  painting ;  for 
not  far  behind  them  was  the  art  of  Rousseau, 
Daubigny,  Dupre,  Courbet,  Diaz,  and,  above  all. 
Millet  and  Corot. 


PROFILES    ROMANTIQUES 


His  place  in  French  art  is  peculiar.  At  a 
time  when  the  classic  convention  was  at  its  most 
GEORGES  triumphant,  he  was  painting  from 
MICHEL  nature  in  the  plain  of  Montmartre, 

1766-1848  intent   upon    realising  a  conception 

of  art  adapted  from,  and  largely  inspired  by  the 
work  of  Ruysdael  and  Hobbema.  He  was,  indeed, 
a  Romantique  before  Romanticism ;  yet  when 
Romanticism  came,  and  was  seen,  and  conquered,  it 
passed  him  by  as  though  he  had  not  been. 

His  handling  is  seldom  strong,  his  modelling  is 
often  primitive  and  naive  ;  but  his  colour — whose 
scheme  is  one  of  low  blues  and  browns — is  some- 
times almost  personal,  and  is  nearly  always 
decorative,  and  his  simple  portraitures  of  nature 
are  touched  with  an  imaginative  quality  that,  con- 
joined with  the  sound  convention  of  which  he  was 
a  master,  enables  them  to  hold  their  own  upon  a 
wall  against  the  good  work  of  far  greater  men. 


40 


i 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  41 

II 

Ingres  was  born  into  an  epoch  which  tempered 
revolt  and  massacre  with  a  studied  mimicry  of  the 
antique ;    and   when,    after    a    term 
of  work  at  Toulouse   under  Roques 
(1754-1847),  who  had  been  the  friend 
and  fellow-student  of  Louis  David  at  Rome,  under 
Vien  (1716-1809),    he    came    to    Paris,    and   was 
received  (1796)  in  David's   studio — '^  David/    said 
he,  '  a  e'te'   le   seul   maitre   de   notre   siecle ' — he 
was  already  himself.     Already,   that   is,   he  con- 
sidered form  to  be  the  essential  in  art,  and  saw 
in  painting,    not  colour   nor  handling  but,  only 
drawing  and  design. 

Under  David,  '  a  sculptor  in  two  dimensions,' 
these  tendencies  were  steadily  developed.  In  1801 
he  won  the  Prix  de  Rome  ;  but  the  State  had 
no  money  to  spare,  and  it  was  not  until  1806  that 
he  could  take  his  place  in  the  Villa  Me'dicis,  where 
he  remained  some  fourteen  years,  addicting  him- 
self, like  his  master,  to  the  study  of  the  paintings 
of  Herculaneum  and  Pompeii,  and,  unlike  him, 
to  the  worship  of  Raphael,  whose  work  he  pored 
over,  analysed,  and  copied  with  all  the  force  of  an 
ardent  and  resolute  nature.  During  this  period, 
too,  he  painted  for  himself  with  amazing  industry. 
His  exhibits  included  the  Q^dipe  et  le  Sphinx  and 
the  Odalisque ;  in  some  others  he  anticipated  the 
material    of  Romanticism  ;  and  in  1824  his   V(bu 


42  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

de  Louis  Treize  made  him  suddenly  famous. 
Hitherto  the  classics  had  disdained  him  :  now  he 
took  his  place  at  the  head  of  the  anti-revolutionary 
army^  and  for  the  next  ten  years  he  combated 
upon  the  sole  right  side.  He  had  many  pupils, 
and  his  authority,  immense  as  it  was,  was  in- 
creased from  time  to  time  by  the  production  of 
such  master-works  as  the  Bertin,  the  Apotheose 
d'Homire,  the  Martyre  de  Saint-Symphorien.  In 
1834  he  left  once  more  for  Rome,  this  time  as 
Director  of  the  Villa  Medicis ;  and  during  his 
tenure  of  office,  which  ended  in  1841,  he  produced 
the  Stratonice,  the  Vierge  a  I'hostie,  and  the  Cheru- 
bini.  For  the  rest  of  his  life  he  made  his  home 
in  Paris,  where,  till  the  end,  he  drew,  painted, 
and  taught  with  admirable  energy  and  persever- 
ance, and  with  a  devotion  to  the  principles  of  art, 
as  he  understood  them,  which  resembled  the 
enthusiasm  of  religion. 

He  was  rude,  quarrelsome,  violent,  excessive  in 
his  likes  and  dislikes.  He  openly  insulted  Delacroix 
— '  Monsieur,  le  dessin  est  la  probite  de  I'art ' — who 
was  one  of  the  staunchest  and  the  most  intelli- 
gent of  his  admirers  ;  he  was  intolerant  of  all  the 
works  and  ways  of  Romanticism  ;  he  called  Rubens 
'the  genius  of  evil,'  and  held  that  to  compare 
'  Rembrandt  and  the  others '  with  '  the  divine 
Raphael '  and  the  Italians  was  simple  blasphemy. 
But  his  sincerity  was  such,  and  such  were  his 
talent  and    accomplishment,    that    where  he  did 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  43 

not  excite  enthusiasm  he  commanded  respect. 
Romanticism  is  ah-eady  ancient  history;  hut  the 
fame  of  Ingres  has  suffered  little  change,  and  even 
in  the  anarchy  of  to-day,  when  Delacroix  is  voted 
dull,  and  Corot  is  superannuate,  and  even  Millet 
and  Rousseau  are  Old  Masters  in  the  bad  sense  of 
the  term,  his  work  is  found  admirable  by  painters 
of  many  schools.  The  reason  seems  to  be  that 
what  he  did  was  undeniably  well  done.  His 
colour  is  cold  and  thin  ;  such  feeling  as  he  had 
for  the  medium  of  paint  was  not  innate  but 
acquired ;  and  his  convention,  received  from 
David,  and  improved  after  the  Raphael  of  the 
Stanze,  is  not  real  enough  to  be  human  nor  lofty 
enough  to  be  heroic.  But  in  its  way  his  draughts- 
manship is  almost  impeccable  ;  and  if  it  be  true 
that  he  considered  painting  as  not  so  much  a 
special  art  as  a  development  of  sculpture,  it  is 
also  true  that  in  the  application  of  this  theory 
he  has  seldom  been  excelled. 


Ill 

CoROT  is  a  culmination.     On  his  own  ground  he 
may  challenge  comparison  with  the  greatest.     He 
entered  upon  his  career  at  a  juncture 
when  the  classic  convention,  as  de- 
veloped  by   the    descendants  of  the 
Poussins,  was  mined  with   decay  and  tottering  to 
its  fall,  and  as  yet  the  forerunners  of  Romanticism 


44  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

were  but  groping  their  way  towards  new  truths 
and  new  ideals ;  and  it  was  his  to  unite  in  his  art 
the  best  tendencies  of  both  the  new  school  and 
the  old.  It  is  to  be  supposed,  that  his  interest  in 
pure  Nature  and  his  perception  of  her  inexhaustible 
suggestiveness  were  stimulated  and  determined  by 
the  revelations  of  certain  artists  who  were  at  once 
his  ancestors  and  his  contemporaries  ;  it  is  at  any 
rate  certain  that  he  was  himself  as  ardent  and 
curious  a  student  of  facts  as  has  ever  painted,  and 
that  the  basis  of  his  art  is  a  knowledge  of  reality 
as  deep  and  sound  as  it  is  rich  and  novel.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  essentials  of  classicism — com- 
position, selection,  treatment,  the  master-quality 
of  style — were  his  by  genius  and  inheritance. 
In  the  artistic  completeness  of  his  formula  he 
stands  with  Claude ;  in  the  freshness  and  novelty 
of  his  material  with  Constable. 

In  him,  however,  there  is  much  that  is  not 
Constable,  and  much  that  is  not  Claude.  There 
is  Corot  himself;  a  personality  as  rare,  as  ex- 
quisite, as  enchanting  as  has  ever  found  ex- 
pression in  the  plastic  arts.  He  had  that  enjoy- 
ment of  his  medium  for  its  own  sake  denied — 
they  tell  us — even  to  Raphael ;  his  sense  of  colour 
was  infallibly  distinguished  and  refined  ;  his  treat- 
ment of  the  rarest  type.  Given  such  means,  and 
no  more,  and  it  is  possible,  as  Courbet  has  shown, 
to  do  great  things.  To  Corot,  who  painted  as 
Jules  Dupre  declared,  '  pour  ainsi  dire,  avec  des 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  45 

ailes  dans  le  dos^'  much  more  was  possible.  In 
his  most  careless  work  there  is  always  art  and 
there  is  always  quality — a  strain  of  elegance,  a 
thrill  of  style,  a  hint  of  the  unseen ;  while  at  his 
best  he  is  not  only  the  consummate  painter,  he  is 
also  the  most  charming  of  poets.  I  think  it  is 
Cherbuliez  who  says  of  Mozart  that  he  was  'the 
only  Athenian  who  ever  wrote  music'  The  phrase 
is  a  good  one :  it  suggests  so  happily  an  ideal 
marriage  of  sentiment  with  style.  With  the  sub- 
stitution of  landscape  for  music,  it  might  be 
Corot's  epitaph.  Corot  is  the  Mozart  of  land- 
scape. 

IV 

He  was  still  a  student  when  in  1822  he  exhibited 
his  Dante  et  Virgile,  and  conquered  reputation 
at  a  stroke.  Gros  (1771-1835),  who  EUGl^NE 
described  the  picture  as  '  du  Rubens  DELACROIX 
chatie,'  offered  to  receive  him  into  1799-1863 
his  studio  ;  but  Delacroix,  much  as  he  admired 
that  master,  refused  the  honourable  opportunity, 
and  till  the  end  remained  with  Guerin,  though 
Guerin  cared  nothing  for  his  work.  The  young 
man  had  something  to  say,  and  was  bent  on 
saying  it  in  terms  of  his  own  ;  he  was,  besides, 
a  great  believer  in  gymnastics — all  his  life  long 
ha  never  sat  down  to  paint  without  making  a 
sketch  from  Poussin,  or  Raphael,  or  the  antique ; 


46  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

and  it  is  probable  that  he  thought  Guerin, 
who  was  only  a  good  sound  academical  draughts- 
man, a  better  master  than  Gros,  whose  manner 
was  more  personal,  and  whose  talent  had  certain 
analogies  with  his  own.  For  the  plastic  and 
decorative  parts  of  art,  he  studied  these  else- 
where :  in  the  studios  of  Ge'ricault  (1791-1824), 
and  Bonington  (1801-1828),  and  Paul  Huet  (1804- 
1869);  in  the  Louvre  under  the  influence  of 
Rubens  ;  in  the  Jardin  des  Plantes  with  Barye 
(1795-1875).  His  indebtedness  to  Constable  (1776- 
1837),  under  whose  inspiration  he  completely 
repainted  his  second  great  picture,  the  Massacre 
de  Scio,  is  matter  of  history  ;  but  it  is  fair  to 
add  that  he  is  said  to  have  anticipated  that 
master's  innovations  in  landscape  studies  of  his 
own  doing,  before  The  Hay  Wain  appeared  upon 
the  scene.  In  1825  he  went  to  England  (Boning- 
ton and  Isabey  were  of  the  party),  where  he 
knew  Lawrence  and  Wilkie,  heard  the  Freisch'dtz 
C^avec  de  la  musique  qu'on  a  supprimee  a  Paris'), 
was  subjugated  by  the  genius  of  Shakespeare  and 
Kean,  and  impelled  anew  in  the  direction  of 
nature  and  romance.  In  1826-27  he  produced, 
among  other  things,  the  historic  lithographs  in 
illustration  of  Faust,  in  which  Goethe  declared 
him  to  have  surpassed  the  author's  own  concep- 
tions. In  1828  he  exhibited  the  Mort  de  b'arda- 
napale,  the  Christ  au  Jardin  des  Oliviers,  and  the 
Marino    Faliero ;    and    in    1830    he   painted    the 


' 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  47 

inspired  le  Vingt-Huit  Juillet.  Two  years  after- 
wards he  went  to  Morocco  (with  the  Ambassador, 
M.  de  Mornay)  and  to  Algiers,  and  brought  back 
the  material  for  the  Femrnes  d' Alger,  the  Convul- 
siojinuires  de  Tanger,  the  Noce  Juive,  and  other 
achievements  in  the  same  vein.  It  was  the  last 
but  one  of  his  journeys.  Italy  he  never  saw.  He 
made  the  round  of  the  Belgian  galleries  in  1838 ; 
and  thereafter  he  quitted  France  no  more- 

From  the  first  (much  against  his  will ;  for  he 
was  a  nervous  and  febrile  creature,  elegant  in 
manners,  refined  in  taste,  incapable  of  pose,  and 
intolerant  of  notoriety)  he  was  saluted  as  a  cham- 
pion of  Romanticism.  But  he  had  seen  such 
mediocrities  as  Louis  Boulanger  and  Eugene 
Deveria  preferred  before  him  in  the  past  :  it  was 
not  until  the  Salon  of  1833  had  revealed  him  for 
a  master  that  he  took  his  place  in  the  forefront 
of  the  movement  as  the  equal  of  Hugo  in  verse 
and  of  Dumas  in  drama,  as  a  captain  of  the 
revolutionary  army.  Then  came  the  Bataille  de 
Taillebourg  gagnee  par  Saint-Louis,  the  Barque  de 
Don  Juan,  the  Bataille  de  Nancy,  the  Combat  du 
Giaour  et  du  pacha,  the  Boissy  d'Anglas,  the  Ovide 
chez  les  Scythes,  the  Justice  de  Trajan,  the  Medee, 
the  Muley  Abd-el-Rahman,  the  Entree  des  croises 
a  Constantinople,  the  decorations  of  the  Palais- 
Bourbon,  the  Louvre,  the  H6tel-de-Ville,  the 
Heliodore  and  the  Lutte  de  Jacob  avec  I'ange  at 
Saint-Sulpice — a    world    of    moving    and    intense 


48  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

creation ;  and  still  his  success  was  only  partial. 
Though  Couture  affected  to  despise  him^  and  to 
Ingres  and  his  followers  he  was  anathema,  the 
painters  were  with  him  almost  to  a  man  ;  Courbet 
himself,  though  he  assumed  he  could  do  as  well 
or  better — even  Courbet  is  found  admitting  the 
superiority  of  the  Massacre  de  Scio.  But  the 
public  were  interested  in  other  things :  the  plain- 
tive heroics  of  Ary  Scheffer,  the  '  last  tableaux ' 
of  Delaroche.  The  Hamlet  of  1836  was  very  far 
from  being  the  only  work  of  his  rejected  by  the 
jury ;  to  the  anger  and  amazement  of  Theodore 
Rousseau,  the  Croises  a  Constantinople  itself  was 
coldly  received  ;  it  was  only  in  1855  that  the 
painter's  force  was  fully  recognised.  In  1859, 
after  several  repulses,  and  the  preference  (amongst 
others)  of  Schnetz  and  Cogniet,  he  was  elected  a 
Member  of  the  Institute,  and  exhibited  for  the 
last  time ;  and  four  years  after,  he  died.  His 
greatest  triumph  was  yet  to  come.  The  exhibi- 
tion of  the  pictures  and  drawings  found  in  his 
studio  was,  says  M.  Burty,  '  une  rehabilitation  et 
une  ivresse.'  Art  was  far  cheaper  then  than  now ; 
but  instead  of  the  hundred  thousand  francs  at 
which  these  relics  had  been  appraised,  the  sale 
brought  in  close  on  three  hundred  and  fifty 
thousand.  Millet,  whose  fortunes  were  at  their 
lowest  ebb,  was  among  the  buyers.  It  was  hard 
work  for  him  to  get  bread,  but  he  could  not  deny 
himself  a  Delacroix  drawing. 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  49 

Apart  from  his  art,  Delacroix  was  a  man  of 
singular  intelligence,  lettered,  of  a  trenchant 
insight  and  broad  sympathies.  In  music  his  ideals 
were  Beethoven  and  Mozart :  he  had  no  liking 
for  the  innovations  of  Berlioz,  and  could  not 
endure  his  own  to  be  compared  with  them.  His 
essays  and  notes  are  something  more  than  good 
reading :  they  prove  that  in  painting  his  tastes 
were  not  less  catholic  than  sound.  He  accepted 
Raphael  and  Poussin  as  completely  as  Rubens 
and  Rembrandt  ;  he  thought  the  world  of 
Charlet  and  the  world  of  Ingres  ;  he  reverenced 
Holbein,  but  that  did  not  prevent  him  from 
greatly  admiring  Gericault  and  Lawrence ;  his 
criticisms,  in  fine,  are  those  of  a  painter  who 
has  mastered  the  theory  as  well  as  the  practice 
of  his  art,  and  is  alive  to  beauty  in  any  and 
every  form.  For  his  place  in  art,  it  has  yet  to  be 
decided.  In  France,  as  I  have  said,  he  is  a 
national  glory  ;  in  England,  where  he  is  little 
known,  and  where  he  is  considered  with  a  certain 
jealousy,  as  one  who  compelled  success  in  a 
department  of  painting  where  certain  Englishmen 
had  found  nothing  but  disaster,  his  technical 
accomplishment  has  been  denied,  and  his  inspira- 
tion dismissed  as  factitious  or  vulgar.  It  is 
argued  that  he  was  too  thoroughly  a  Frenchman 
of  1830  to  be  interesting  to  all  time  and  to  all 
peoples ;  and  in  the  argument  there  is  no  doubt 
a  certain  truth,  as  there  is  in  its  converse,  that 

D 


50  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

it  is  precisely  because  he  was  a  typical  French- 
man and  a  representative  of  his  epoch  that  he 
is  to  be  accepted  now  as  one  of  the  greatest 
in  his  century.  The  final  judgment  will  pro- 
bably smell  of  both  these  verdicts.  What 
Delacroix  did  was  to  express  the  spirit,  the  ten- 
dencies, the  ideals,  the  passions,  the  weaknesses  of 
a  new  age  in  terms  so  novel  and  forcible  as  to 
be  absolutely  appropriate.  The  violence,  the 
brutality,  the  insincerity,  the  bad  taste,  of  which 
it  is  complained,  were  not  specially  his  :  they 
were  inherent  in  the  movement,  and  we  must 
allow  for  them  in  Delacroix  as  we  allow  for  them 
in  Byron  and  Hugo,  in  Atula  and  the  Symphonie 
fantastique,  in  Antony  and  Rolla  and  la  Peau  de 
chagrin.  It  is  safe  to  say  that,  if  that  be  done, 
much  will  remain  that  is  imperishable.  It  has  yet 
to  be  proved  that  his  literary  imagination — the 
gift  of  evocation  which  made  him  the  familiar  and 
the  commentator  of  Ariosto,  Dante,  Shakespeare, 
Scott,  Byron,  and  Goethe :  the  quality,  says 
Baudelaire,  '  qui  fait  de  lui  le  peintre  aime  des 
poetes ' — is  human  and  sound  enough  to  survive 
the  touch  of  time.  Of  his  plastic  endowment 
there  can  be  no  such  doubt.  If  he  were  nothing 
else,  he  was  a  painter;  and  if  he  did  nothing  else,  he 
thought  in  pictures.  His  colour — which  llossetti 
did  not  like — is  not  the  dress,  the  decoration,  of 
his  ideas,  but  a  vital  part  of  them  ;  often  loose 
and  incorrect,  his   drawing   is   always   expressive 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  51 

and  significant ;  his  invention  is  inexhaustible ; 
his  capacity  of  treatment  may  be  compared  to 
that  of  Hugo  in  words  and  to  that  of  Berlioz 
in  music.  There  is  no  department  of  painting  in 
which  he  did  not  try  his  hand,  and  none  on  which 
he  did  not  leave  his  mark.  History  and  romance^ 
religion  and  portraiture,  genre  and  landscape  and 
the  figure — in  all  of  them  he  was  Eugene  Dela- 
croix. 

'^En  le  supprimant,'  says  Baudelaire,  '^on  sup- 
primerait  un  monde  de  sensations  et  d'idees,  on 
ferait  une  lacune  trop  grande  dans  la  chaine 
histori^jue.'  That  is  the  poet's  view.  The  painter 
is  not  less  imperious  and  explicit.  '^Nous  ne 
sommes  plus  au  temps  des  Olympiens,'  says 
Theodore  Rousseau,  '  comme  Raphael,  Veronese, 
et  Rubens,  et  I'art  de  Delacroix ' — that  Delacroix 
who  represents  ^I'esprit,  le  verbe  de  son  temps,' 
and  in  whose  '  lamentations  exage'rees '  and  whose 
'  triomphes  retentissants '  there  is  always  '  le 
souffle  de  la  poitriue,  son  cri,  son  mal,  et  le  notre  ' 
— that  art  is  '  puissant  comme  une  voix  de  I'enfer 
du  Dante.'  Here  is  a  curiosity  of  art  criticism  : 
perhaps  for  the  only  time  in  history,  the  poetic 
and  the  technical  critic  are  at  one. 


Bonington's  father  was  for  some  time  Governor 
of  Nottingham  Castle  ;  but,  being  in  the  worst  of 


52  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

ways  'an  artist' — that  is,  a  man  incapable  of  decency 

or  regularity — he  was  degraded  from  his   official 

position.      Upon   this  he   left  Eng- 
BONINGTON      ^^^^^   ^^^  ^^^^  ^^   p^^^^^   ^-^^^^  j^^ 

set  up  a  lace-shop.  He  was  a  painter 
of  portraits  when  he  chose  ;  and  his  son,  who 
also  was  his  pupil,  went  with  him,  and  at  fifteen 
was  copying  in  the  Louvre,  and  drawing  at  the 
Ecole  des  Beaux-Arts  and  in  the  studio  of  Baron 
Gros.  It  was  then  the  beginning  of  Romanticism. 
Napoleon  had  vanished  to  Saint  Helena ;  but 
Gros  in  painting,  Spontini  and  Lesueur  in  music, 
and  Chateaubriand  and  Mme.  de  Stael  in  litera- 
ture— all  these  were  living  and  potent  influences, 
and  Bonington,  whose  training  was  practically 
French,  and  whose  sympathies  were  altogether 
individual,  was  destined  to  play  a  part  not  much 
inferior  in  importance  to  the  best  of  them.  After 
his  kind,  indeed,  and  in  his  degree,  he  was  one  of 
the  leaders  of  the  Romantic  Movement.  He 
knew  Ge'ricault,  and  was  one  of  those  who  wit- 
nessed (1819)  the  triumph  of  the  admirable  Radeau 
de  la  Meduse.  He  was  the  friend,  and  in  some 
sort  the  master,  of  Eugene  Delacroix,  who  pro- 
fessed the  highest  admiration  of  him,  and  whose 
companion — with  Isabey  and  Colin — he  was  when, 
in  1825,  the  painter  of  the  Dante  et  Virgile  and 
the  Massacre  de  Scio  crossed  the  Channel  to  look 
about  him  in  England,  and  study  Wilkie  and 
Lawrence  and  Constable  on  their  own  ground  ;  and 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  63 

to  both  these,  as  to  many  others  great  and  small — 
Ary  Scheffer,  Isabey,  Flers,  Roqueplan,  Troyon, 
and  Paul  Huet — his  work  was  an  influence  and 
an  example.  He  had  in  him  the  makings  of  a 
great  artist ;  he  could  achieve,  and  he  could  sug- 
gest and  inspire  ;  it  appeared  that  he  was  marked 
out  for  the  highest  destiny. 

But  his  career  was  brief.  In  1822  he  went 
to  Venice,  and  what  he  did  there  is  still,  in 
its  way,  a  national  possession.  He  exhibited — 
with  Harding,  AV^ld,  the  two  Fieldiugs,  Lawrence, 
and  John  Constable — at  that  famous  Salon  of 
1824  which  is  the  date  of  a  new  departure  in 
modern  art ;  and,  like  Constable  and  Copley 
Fielding,  he  was  found  worthy  of  a  gold  medal. 
He  is  heard  of  again  at  the  British  Institution 
in  1826,  and  again  at  the  Royal  Academy  in 
1828  ;  and  wlierever  he  appears  he  astonishes  and 
triumphs.  He  was  good,  indeed,  at  whatever 
he  chose  to  essay.  In  lithography — a  medium 
in  which  the  Romanticists  won  some  of  their 
greatest  triumphs — he  was  equally  active  and 
expert ;  his  work  in  oils  was  worthy  of  the  time 
of  brave  experiment  and  achievement  at  which 
it  was  done ;  in  water-colours  he  was  a  head 
and  shoulders  better  than  the  best  about  him. 
Then,  his  versatility  was  uncommon  :  he  painted 
water,  and  he  painted  landscape,  and  he  painted 
history,  and  his  work,  whatever  the  theme,  was 
remarkable.     There  can  be  no  doubt  that^  had  he 


54  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

lived^  he  would  have  rivalled  with  the  very  great- 
est of  the  moderns,  and  have  been,  like  Constable 
and  like  Delacroix,  a  leader  and  a  chef  d'ecole. 
But  at  seven-and-twenty  he  died  of  brain-fever, 
the  result  of  a  sunstroke  caught  while  sketching  ; 
and  I  cannot  but  think  that  Art  has  sustained  no 
greater  loss  since  his  demise. 

He  was  a  painter  of  extraordinary  talent,  and 
of  promise  more  extraordinary  still.  "^11  y  a 
terriblement  a  gagner  dans  la  societe  de  ce  luron- 
la,'  says  Delacroix,  'et  je  te  jure  que  je  m'en  suis 
bien  trouve.'  There  are  some  moderns,  he  con- 
tinues, who  are  his  friend's  superiors  in  strength, 
it  may  be,  and  in  exactness ;  but  there  is  none, 
and  perhaps  there  never  has  been  any,  who 
possesses  '  cette  legc-rete  d'execution,  qui,  particu- 
lierement  dans  I'aquarelle,  fait  de  ses  ouvrages 
des  especes  de  diamants  dont  I'oeil  est  flatte  et  ravi 
independammentde  tout  sujet  et  de  toute  imitation.' 
He  could  never,  he  goes  on  to  say,  '  se  lasser 
d'admirer  sa  merveilleuse  entente  de  I'effet  et  la 
facilitc  de  son  execution.'  Bonington,  it  is  true, 
was  difficult  to  please  ;  he  would  often  completely 
repaint  "^des  morceaux  entierement  acheve's,  et 
(jui  nous  paraissaient  merveilleux ' ;  but  his  accom- 
plishment and  genius  were  such  that  '  il  retrou- 
vait  a  I'instant  sous  sa  brosse  de  nouveaux  effets 
aussi  charmants  que  les  premiers.'  And  withal  he 
had  such  a  talent  of  adaptation  and  assimilation 
as  recalls   the    heroic    practice    of    Dumas.     He 


PROFILES  ROM  ANTIQUES  55 

would  quietly  work  in  a  figure,  or  a  set  of  acces- 
sories, from  a  picture  known  to  everybody  who 
saw  him  paint ;  and  he  would  do  this  in  such  a 
way  that  (it  is  always  Delacroix  who  speaks)  his 
borrowings  '  augmentaient  lair  de  verite'  de  ses 
personnages,  et  ne  sentaient  jamais  le  pastiche. 
Bonington's  gift,  indeed,  was  rarely  equal  in 
(juality  and  comprehensive  in  ambition  and  attain- 
ment. In  historical  genre  his  achievement  has 
been  surpassed ;  it  has  been  surpassed  in  land- 
scape and  marine  ;  but  in  all  these  it  is  brilliantly 
individual,  and  in  the  two  last  it  has,  besides,  the 
charm  which  comes  of  sentiment  and  a  right 
distinction  of  style. 


VI 

He   aspired    to   paint   religion   and   history,   as 
well  as  Smyrniote   life  and  true  Levantine   light 
and  colour  ;   and  in  183-4,  when  he 
exhibited     his     famous    Defaite    des 

1        1      3  1  •     1  f       •  1  i8o3-i86o 

Cimbres,  he  had  his  hour  of  triumph. 
It  was  his  one  great  success  in  this  department : 
he  never  reached  again  the  same  height  of 
popularity.  And  the  reasons  are  not  far  to  seek. 
For  one  thing.  Romanticism  was  not  officially 
accepted :  it  was  understood  to  mean  no  more 
than  immorality  in  theory  and  incompetence  in 
practice ;  and  Decamps  was  one  of  the  ensigns 
of  Romanticism.     For  another,  his  education  was 


66  VTEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

imperfect,  his  brain  and  hand  were  out  of  unison  ; 
the  one  might  plan,  but  the  other  could  not 
execute.  Decamps  was  naturally  proud  and 
angry ;  and  it  is  not  surprising  that  he  should 
soon  have  chosen  to  avoid  the  trials  and  disasters 
of  publicity.  After  1834  he  exhibited  but  seldom, 
sold  his  pictures  straight  from  the  easel,  and 
spent  his  life  in  profitless  attempts  at  heroic  work. 
'  You  are  a  lucky  fellow,'  he  said  to  Millet,  after 
the  painter  of  le  Semeur  had  shown  him  all  the 
pictures  in  his  studio  :  '  you  can  do  what  you  want 
to  do.'  Decamps  could  not ;  and  he  died  (of  a  fall 
from  his  horse)  a  disappointed  man. 

He  was  hardly  one  of  the  paladins  of  Romanti- 
cism ;  but  he  bore  no  inconspicuous  part  in  the 
battle,  and  his  influence  was  good  in  type  and  con- 
siderable in  degree.  His  intelligence— quick, 
inquiring,  tenacious — readily  received  new  truths 
and  new  ideas  ;  he  was  the  sworn  admirer  of  such 
great  explorers  as  Rousseau  and  Delacroix  ;  of  its 
kind  his  interest  in  nature  was  both  vigorous  and 
sustained  ;  as  a  colourist  he  was  individual 
enough  to  have  had  many  imitators ;  he  grappled 
hard  with  the  problems  of  illumination  and  atmo- 
spheric environment ;  and  as  a  pioneer  and  experi- 
mentalist he  is  deserving  of  much  respect.  He 
lived  to  witness  the  triumph  of  Romanticism ; 
but  the  greater  honours  were  not  for  him,  and 
he  is  probably  best  remembered  as  a  discoverer  of 
the  painters'  East. 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  57 

VII 

Diaz   had    many  masters — Delacroix^  Corregio, 

Millet,    Rousseau,    Prud'hon — and    succumbed   to 

many  influences  in  turn.     But  if  he 

followed,  it  was  only  that  he  might 

,      ,      .^  •,  .    ,     .  1808-1876 

learn  to  lead  ;   if  he  copied,  it  was 

the  more  completely  to  express  himself.  His 
master-qualities  are  fancy  and  charm  ;  but  capri- 
cious as  he  was,  and  enchanting  as  he  never  failed 
to  be,  he  was  a  rare  observer  of  nature.  '  Per- 
sonne,'  says  M.  Jules  Dupre,  '^n'a  compris  mieux 
que  lui  la  loi  de  la  lumiere,  la  magie,  et  pour  ainsi 
dire  la  folic,  du  soleil  dans  les  feuilles  et  les  sous- 
bois.'  What  gives  his  work  its  peculiar  quality  of 
delightfulness  is  the  combination  of  lovely  fact  with 
graceful  fiction.  His  world  would  be  Arcadia  if  it 
were  not  so  real — would  be  the  world  we  live  in  if  it 
did  not  teem  with  exquisite  impossibilities.  I  think 
of  him  as  of  an  amiable  and  light-hearted  Rem- 
brandt. He  had  a  touch  of  the  madness  of  genius, 
or  that  madness  of  the  sunshine  (of  which  his  old 
companion  speaks)  would  certainly  have  escaped 
him.  And  rightly  to  express  his  ideas  and  sen- 
sations, he  made  himself  a  wonderful  vocabulary. 
His  palette  was  composed,  not  of  common  pig- 
ments but,  of  molten  jewels :  they  clash  in  the 
richest  chords,  they  sing  in  triumphant  unisons,  as 
the  voices  of  the  orchestra  in  a  score  of  Berlioz.  If 
they  meant  nothing  they  would  still  be  delicious. 


68  VIEW8  AND  REVIEWS 

Btit  beyond  them  is  Diaz — the  poet^  the /antaisisfe, 
the  artist ;  and  that  makes  them  unique. 


VIII 

His  advance  was  neither  erratic  nor  slow.     First 

seen  at  the  Salon  of  1832^  he  was  the  recipient  of 

Third   and   Second   Class   medals  in 
TEOYON  jggg  ^^^  jg^Q^  ^^  p.^g^  ^,j^gg  medals 

1810-1863  .  ,  .    ,       ^ 

in    1846    and    1848;    of  the   Legion 

of  Honour  in   1849 ;  and  of  another   First  Class 

medal    at    the    Exposition    Universelle    of    1855, 

when  he  exhibited  the  Bamfs  allant  au  labour  by 

which  he  is  represented  in  the  Louvre. 

He  began  with  landscape  pure  and  simple,  and 

it  was  in  that  field  that  he  won  his  earlier  successes. 

Like  Rousseau,  he  attempted  subjects  of  several 

sorts,  and  went  far  and  often  afield  in  search  of 

inspiration.     He  was  found  painting,  not  only  at 

Sevres   and    Saint-Cloud    and    in   the    Forest    of 

P'ontainebleau  but,  in  Brittany  and  the  Limousin 

and  all  over  Normandy  ;  and  it  was  a  sketching 

tour  in  Holland  that  revealed  his  vocation  to  him, 

and,  by  determining  a  change  of  manner  and  theme, 

first  set  him  in  the  way  of  immortality.      Hitherto 

(1833-1846)  he  had  been  known  for  the  violence  of 

his  colour,  the  truculency  of  his  brush-work,  his 

excesses  in  the  matter  of  paint.     In  the  study  of 

the  Dutch  masters — particularly,  it  is  said,  of  Paul 

Potter  and  Rembrandt — he  acquired  a  knowledge 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  59 

of  saner  principles^  developed  a  capacity  for  better 
work,  and  discovered  his  fitness  for  the  conquest  of 
a  new  province  in  art ;  and  after  1848  he  was  him- 
self, he  was  Troyon  the  animalier,  the  greatest 
painter  of  sheep  and  cattle  of  his  century.  He 
had  succeeded  to  his  true  inheritance,  and  he  con- 
tinued to  enjoy  it  till  his  death.  To  say  that  he 
was  very  popular,  and  sold  whatever  he  would,  is 
to  say  that  he  produced  much  loose,  careless,  and 
indifferent  stuff :  that,  in  a  word,  he  was  no  more 
above  pot-boiling-  than  Corot  or  Van  Dyck.  But 
he  did  great  work  as  well ;  and  his  good  things 
are  good  indeed. 

His  Romanticism  was  but  an  effect  of  example 
and  the  paintiness  of  youth.  Having  sown  his 
wild  oats,  he  returned  to  the  contemplation  of 
nature  with  eyes  renewed  and  a  novel  understand- 
ing ;  and  he  recorded  a  set  of  impressions  distin- 
guished by  rare  sincerity  of  purpose  and  directness 
of  insight  in  a  style  of  singular  breadth,  vigour, 
and  felicity.  His  drawing  is  loose  and  inexact ; 
and  he  composes,  not  as  an  inheritor  of  Claude 
but,  as  a  contemporary  of  Rousseau.  But  he  had 
the  true  pictorial  sense  ;  and,  if  his  lines  be  often 
insignificant,  his  masses  are  perfectly  proportioned, 
his  values  are  admirably  graded,  his  tonality  is 
faultless,  his  effect  is  absolute.  His  method  is  the 
large,  serene,  and  liberal  expression  of  great  crafts- 
manship ;  and  to  the  interest  and  the  grace  of  art 
his  colour  unites  the  charm  of  individuality,  the 


60  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

richness  and  the  potency  of  a  kind  of  natural  force. 
His  training  in  landscape  was  varied  and  severe ; 
and  when  he  came  to  his  right  work,  he  applied  its 
results  with  almost  inevitable  assurance  and  tact. 
He  does  not  sentimentalise  his  animals,  nor  concern 
himself  with  the  drama  of  their  character  and 
gesture.  He  takes  them  as  components  in  a 
general  scheme ;  and  he  paints  them  as  he  has 
seen  them  in  nature — enveloped  in  atmosphere  and 
light,  in  an  environment  of  leas  and  streams  and 
living  leafage.  His  work  is  not  to  take  the  por- 
traits of  trees  or  animals  or  sites,  but,  as  in  echoes 
of  Virgilian  music,  to  suggest  and  typify  the 
country  :  with  its  tranquil  meadows,  its  luminous 
skies,  its  quiet  waters,  and  that  abundance  of  flocks 
and  herds  at  once  the  symbol  and  the  source  of  its 
prosperity. 


IX 

He  is  an  artist  who  cares  nothing  for  money  or 
fame  and  everything  for  art ;  he  is  able  to  follow 

his   bent,    and  paint   as   he  pleases, 

DUPR^ 

and  he  has  had  his  reward.     To  the 

1812-1889  ,  ,       ,  .  ,. 

young  zealots  who  have  just  dis- 
covered the  Blue  Shadow  his  name  and  example 
are  of  small  account.  But  by  artists  he  is  re- 
spected and  acclaimed  as  the  last  of  a  greater 
generation. 

He  is  still  a  contemporary  ;  and  to  estimate  the 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  61 

worth  of  his  art  is  impossible.  It  may,  however, 
be  said  that  his  achievement  is  both  vast  and 
varied,  and  is  touched  throughout  with  a  peculiar 
poetry.  As  becomes  the  friend  and  champion  of 
Rousseau,  the  great  experimentalist,  the  indefatig- 
able explorer,  he  has  attempted  nature  in  all  its 
aspects.  He  has  painted  the  melancholy  of  the 
plain,  the  peaceful  serenity  of  fat  pasture  and 
pleasant  upland,  the  mystery  of  the  forest,  the 
vastness  of  the  sea ;  and  he  has  infused  with  his 
own  sincere  personality  whatever  he  has  done.  In 
an  age  of  backsliding  and  charlatanism  he  has  up- 
held the  dignity  of  imaginative  art,  and  the  tradi- 
tions of  the  school  he  helped  to  found  and  has 
done  so  much  to  illustrate.     [1888.] 


In  the  beginning  all  went  well  with  Rousseau. 
Romanticism  was  in  the  gaudiness  of  full  flower : 
it  was  the  year  of  Antony  and  Dar-  THEODORE 
lington  at  the  Porte-Saint-Martin  ROUSSEAU 
and    of    Marion     Delorme     at     the  1812-1867 

Theatre-Franc^ais,  of  le  Vingt-Huit  Juillet  at  the 
Salon  and  Robert  le  Diable  at  the  Acade'mie  de 
Musique,  of  Balzac's  Peau  de  chagrin  and  Hugo's 
Notre-dame,  the  Atar-gull  of  Eugene  Sue  and 
the  Roi  des  ribauds  of  Paul  Lacroix ;  and  that 
Rousseau    was    a   deserter    from   Remond    and   a 


62  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

recreant  from  the  faith  of  llemond's  gods  was 
sufficient  to  secure  attention  to  his  aims,  respect 
for  his  ideals,  and  unshrinking  confidence  in  his 
capacity.  His  first  Salons  were  those  of  1831  and 
1833 ;  in  1834  he  appears  to  have  gained  a  medal, 
and  sold  his  picture,  a  Lisiere  de  bois,  to  the  Duke 
d'Orleans ;  in  1835  he  was  once  more  represented, 
and  by  a  couple  of  Esquisses.  Then  the  tide 
turned.  To  the  Jury  of  1836 — Heim,  Bidault, 
Ingres,  Schnetz,  the  two  Vernets,  Paul  Delaroche, 
Guerin,  among  others — he  submitted  his  Descente 
des  vaches,  a  landscape  with  cattle  painted  from 
sketches  made  in  the  Jura  ;  and,  in  company  with 
Marilhat,  Champmartin,  Paul  Huet,  Louis  Bou- 
langer,  Barye,  and  Delacroix,  he  was  refused  a 
place  in  the  official  exhibition.  He  remained 
without  the  gates  till  1848 ;  and  but  for  the 
accident  of  a  revolution  he  might  not  have  recon- 
quered the  right  of  way  so  soon. 

His  position  during  these  twelve  years  of  exile 
was  more  or  less  distressing.  Decamps,  George 
Sand,  Daumier,  Delacroix  were  his  admirers  and 
well-wishers  ;  Diaz,  Ary  ScheflPer,  Jules  Dupre,  the 
critic  Thore  were  the  most  diligent  among  his 
friends.  Revered  and  commiserated  on  the  one 
hand  as  one  of  the  martyr-saints  of  Romanticism, 
he  was  execrated  on  the  other  as  a  sort  of  helot  in 
drink.  Sometimes  he  sold  a  picture,  and  more  often 
than  not  he  was  free  to  paint  and  repaint  his  work 
at  will.    He  was  not  of  a  happy  disposition  ;  and,  as 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  63 

he  took  himself  and  his  reverses  with  a  certain 
solemnity,  'tis  probable  that  he  suffered.  Things 
were  first  mended  for  him  by  the  advent  of 
the  Second  Republic.  The  official  jury  was  dis- 
missed ;  the  mob  of  painters  took  to  self-govern- 
ment ;  and  Rousseau  was  elected  one  of  the  jury 
of  1848,  the  first  under  the  new  dispensation. 
Then  Ledru-Rollin,  as  head  of  the  State,  gave  him 
a  capital  commission ;  and  after  a  lifetime  of 
anxious  chastity:  in  the  course  of  which,  impelled 
thereto,  as  Sensier  explains,  '  par  une  susceptibilite 
outree  de  son  caractere,'  he  declined  the  hand  of 
a  young  lady  to  whom  he  was  deeply  attached, 
and  who  was  very  much  in  love  with  him  :  he 
threw  in  his  lot  with  a  payse  of  his  who  had  cast 
herself  on  his  protection,  and  retired  for  good  and 
all  to  Barbizon.  But  there  was  a  sickly  strain 
in  him  ;  and  the  passage  from  absolute  failure  to 
comparative  success  was  not  at  first  to  his  advan- 
tage. In  1849  he  exhibited  for  the  first  time  since 
his  exclusion  thirteen  years  before.  He  won  a 
First  Class  medal  ;  but  when  he  found  that  Jules 
Dupre,  who  had  given  him  proof  after  proof  of 
faultless  friendship,  had  received  the  red  ribbon 
he  professed  himself  affronted,  refused  to  be 
appeased,  and  broke  with  his  old  comrade  there 
and  then.  To  the  Salon  of  1851  he  sent  six 
canvases ;  but  this  year  the  ribbon  fell  to  Diaz, 
and  Rousseau,  after  charging  the  Hanging  Com- 
mittee    with    conspiracy,    and    being    compelled 


64  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

to  retract  his  accusation,  gave  out  that  he 
would  exhibit  no  more.  He  kept  his  word  until 
the  Salon  of  1852,  where  he  was  represented  by 
an  Effet  de,  givre  and  a  Paysage  aprt-s  la  pluie, 
which  gained  him  at  last  admission  into  the 
Legion.  After  this  the  circumstances  of  his  life 
and  the  quality  of  his  temper  improved.  So 
at  the  Exposition  Universelle  of  1855  he  was 
splendidly  conspicuous ;  he  made  money  enough 
to  pay  Millet  4000  francs  for  his  Greffeur ;  he  had 
so  far  improved  in  temper  and  tact  as  to  make  the 
purchase  not  in  his  own  behalf,  but  as  the  agent 
of  a  rich  American.  By  1857  he  had  acquired 
sufficient  importance  to  be  made  the  victim 
of  a  sort  of  '  knock-out  '  on  the  part  of  a 
Belgian  dealer.  In  18G1  he  sold  a  lot  of  twenty- 
five  pictures  and  studies  at  the  Hotel  Drouot  for 
some  37,000  francs  ;  in  1863  another  lot  of  seven- 
teen for  close  on  15,000  francs.  Three  years  later 
Prince  Demidoff  commissioned  him  to  paint  two 
pictures  for  10,000  francs  apiece  ;  while  with  MM. 
Brame  and  Durand-Ruel  he  did  business  to  the 
extent  of  140,000  francs,  and  after  paying  his 
debts  was  able  to  spend  some  30,000  francs  upon 
Japanese  drawings  and  rare  prints.  In  1866  he 
was  a  member  of  the  Salon  Jury  and  the  Emperor's 
guest  at  Compiegne  ;  and  tho  year  after  he  sent  two 
pictures  to  the  .Salon,  exhibited  over  a  hundred 
sketches  and  studies  at  the  Cercle  des  Arts,  and 
was  appointed   President  of  the  Jury  at  the  Ex- 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  65 

position  Universelle,  where  he  was  represented  by 
thirteen  of  his  finest  works.  For  these  he  was 
presently  awarded  one  of  the  four  Medals  of 
Honour.  The  distinction,  which  he  shared  with 
MM.  Cabanel,  Meissonier,  and  Gerome,  was  a 
tremendous  blow  to  him.  He  had  set  his  heart  on 
officer's  rank  in  the  Legion  ;  Corot,  Pils,  Gerome, 
Jules  Breton,  and  Fran^ais  were  gazetted  with- 
out him  ;  the  disappointment  was  greater  than  he 
could  endure.  He  was  promoted  after  some  little 
delay ;  but  he  had  meanwhile  been  stricken  with 
paralysis,  and  after  a  six  months'  agony  he  died  in 
the  December  of  the  same  year.  Mme.  Rousseau 
had  long  been  hopelessly  insane  :  you  read  of  her, 
unconscious  of  bereavement,  capering  and  singing 
in  the  very  chamber  of  death. 

Rousseau  was  not  the  poet  of  a  site,  the  wooer 
of  a  single  dryad.  Insatiable  of  experience, 
greedy  of  discovery  and  conquest,  he  was  for  ever 
breaking  new  ground  and  opening  up  fresh  pro- 
vinces of  material.  He  began  by  exploring  the 
environs  of  Paris,  and  passed  at  a  stride  to  the 
rocks  and  solitudes  of  Auvergne.  He  was  at  least 
twice  in  Normandy  (1831  and  1832),  where  he 
studied  the  Cotes  de  Granville  of  his  second  Salon. 
In  1834  and  1861  he  painted  in  the  Jura,  where 
he  collected  the  material  of  his  Descente  des  vaches 
and  his  Vue  de  la  chahie  des  Alpes  (1867).  In  1835- 
86  be  went  to  Broglie,  to  paint  a  view  of  the  castle, 
commissioned  of  him   by  the  Duke  as  a  gift  for 


66  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

Guizot ;  and  in  1837  he  worked  long  in  Brittany, 
the  scene  of  the  Marais  en  Vendee  (called  '  la  Soupe 
aux  herbes ')  and  the  Avenue  des  chdtaigniers.     He 
was  thrice  with  Jules  Dupre  in  the  Ile-de-France 
(1841,  1845,  and  1846),  and  among  the  booty  which 
he  brought  back  with  him  were  the  Effet  de  givre, 
the  Lisicre  de  hois:  Soleil  couchant,  and  a  famous 
Avenue  de  foret.     From  Berry  (1842)  he  returned 
with  the  Mare,  the  Cures,  the  Jetee  d'un  etang  apres 
la  pluie ;    from    Gascony    (1844),    with   the   Four 
communal  and  the  Marais  dans   la   lande.      But 
his  favourite  painting-ground  was  the  Forest  of 
Fontainebleau.      He    discovered    it    as    early    as 
1833 ;  year  after  year  he  lodged  at  Ganne's,  the 
historic  tavern,  or  in  some  peasant's  cot,  within 
easy  distance   of  the   Bas-Breau   and  the  Gorges 
d'Apremont ;  he  set  up  his  tent  in  Barbizon  in 
1848,  and  abode  there  until  he  died.     Here  Diaz 
was  his  pupil ;  here  Jacque  and  Millet  were  his 
neighbours  ;  here,  as  in  a  vast  open-air  studio,  he 
matured    his    largest    inspirations,    resolved     his 
knottiest    problems,    illustrated    his    boldest   and 
richest  effects.     The  Forest  has  had  no  truer  lover 
and  no  better  painter.     He  saw  it,  not  as  a  crowd 
of  trees  but,  as  a  monstrous  organism,  an  enormous 
individuality ;  and  he  has  rendered  as  none  else 
has  done  the  sense  of  its   complex    mystery  and 
immensity,  its  infinite  changefulness  of  colour  and 
form,  its  multitudinous  life,  its  impenetrable  con- 
fusion of  birth  and  death  and  increase  and  decay. 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  67 

r  have  traced  his  wanderings  in  search  of  sugges- 
tion and  experience  with  this  particularity  in 
order  to  show  the  range  of  his  ambition^  the 
originality  of  his  experiments^  the  variety  and 
novelty  of  his  results.  As  a  rule  his  method 
of  production  was  painfully  laborious  and  slow  : 
the  foundations  of  his  pictures  were  constructed 
and  made  out  with  a  reed  pen  in  their  smallest 
details  ;  and  on  the  formation  thus  provided  stratum 
after  stratum  of  paint  was  superimposed,  until  an 
end  was  gained,  and  he  deemed  that  no  more  could 
be  done.  But  the  sum  of  his  achievement  is  very 
large,  and  its  quality  is  disconcertingly  unequal. 
It  may  be  that,  like  AV^ordsworth,  he  caught  at 
more  than  art  could  grasp ;  and  it  may  be  that 
his  hand  was  only  now  and  then  the  faithful 
servant  of  his  brain  ;  or  it  may  be  that  he  suffered 
from  perplexity,  and  was  fain  to  grope  his  way 
towards  ideals  that  were  dimly  seen  at  first,  and 
that  shifted  shapes  as  he  advanced,  as  a  mountain 
reveals  itself  under  new  aspects  with  every  turn  of 
the  road.  What  is  certain  is  that,  while  too  often 
niggled  and  incoherent,  '  precious '  yet  inarticu- 
late, at  his  best  he  had  orig-inality  of  conception 
and  sincerity  and  strength  of  sentiment,  with  a 
large  and  noble  method,  a  singular  power  of  ex- 
pressing and  evoking  emotion,  a  magnificent  view 
of  colour,  an  admirable  potency  of  style.  Sensier 
relates  that,  even  in  his  darkest  hours,  it  was  hard 
for  him  to  part  with  his  works  :  he  would  keep  them 


08  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

for  yearsj  and  retouch  and  repaint  till  sometimes, 
as  from  the  unknown  masterpiece  in  Balzac's  story, 
the  'glory  and  the  dream '  had  been  painted  quite 
away.  Thus  his  successors  find  him  most  con- 
sistently admirable  in  his  ehauches — his  '  lay-ins ' ; 
and  the  impression  produced  by  his  life  and  achieve- 
ment is  one  of  incompleteness.  His  art,  indeed, 
has  none  of  the  consummate  and  joyous  mastery  of 
Corot's.  It  is  not  seldom  heroically  inspired  and 
irresistibly  expressed  ;  but  it  is  mainly  tentative 
and  experimental,  and  it  is  often  touched  with 
failure. 

XI 

Millet's  real  teachers  were  the  Old  Masters  in 
the    Louvre,    and   especially   Correggio,    Nicolas 

Poussin,    and   Michelangelo :    '  celui 

MILLET 

qui  me  hanta  si  fortement  toute  ma 

vie.'      From  the  first  he  learned  the 

processes    of    colour    and    modelling;    from    the 

second    the    principles    of    composition    and    the 

gi'eater  and  severer  exigencies  of  style ;  and  from 

the  third  the  mystery  of  gesture  and  expression. 

Other  influences  were   Rubens  and  Delacroix  in 

one  direction,  and  in  another  Mantegna,  Angelico, 

and   Filippo   Lippi ;   and   later  Rembrandt  came, 

and   the  great  landscape    painters  contemporary 

with  himself. 

Painted  to  sell,  his  earlier  pictures  are  frankly 

and     naively    sensuous.       Their    colour    is    rich 


PROFILES  ROM  ANTIQUES  69 

enough  to  remind  us  that  for  years  the  painter 
was  the  friend  and  fellow-worker  of  Diaz ;  in 
modelling  and  chiaroscuro  they  are  often  admir- 
able ;  they  express^  in  terms  that  are  sometimes 
sumptuous  and  always  beautiful^  a  liberal  and 
healthy  sentiment  of  the  nude.  It  was  not  until 
Millet  left  Paris  for  Barbizon  (18i9)  that  he 
returned  to  the  ideals'of  his  youth^  and  became,  by 
swift  and  easy  stages,  the  epic  painter  of  rusticity. 
At  Barbizon,  where  he  knew  Rousseau,  and  where 
he  laboured  till  his  death,  he  began  by  producing 
his  puissant  and  affecting  Semeui-,  which  was  ex- 
hibited in  1850,  the  year  of  Courbet's  Enterrement 
d'Ornans.  It  was  the  first  of  a  long  line  of  master- 
pieces— the  Glaneuaes,  the  Bucheron  et  la  Mort,  the 
Uomme  a  la  houe,  the  Meules,  the  Berger  au  pare, 
the  Vigneron  au  repos,  to  name  but  these — in  which 
the  new  capacities  of  landscape,  the  conquests  of 
Rousseau  and  Diaz  and  Constable,  are  found  in 
combination  with  an  heroic  treatment  of  the  figure. 
This  development  was  Millet's  work,  and  remains 
the  chief  of  his  contribution  to  art. 

Both  elements  are  fused  in  so  close  an  intimacy 
as  to  form  but  one  interest,  so  that,  pictorially 
considered,  each  picture  of  Millet's  is  an  organic 
whole.  But  this  is  not  all.  Of  most  the  effect 
is  ethical  as  well  as  plastic.  They  are  not  simply 
works  of  art :  they  are  as  it  were  lay-sermous  in 
paint,  for  they  embody  ideas  which,  if  not  absolutely 
literary  in  themselves,  are   to   some   extent  sus- 


70  VlEVyS  AND  REVIEWS 

ceptible  of  a  literary  expression.  It  was  Millet's 
weaknessj  in  fact,  that  he  was  not  less  poet  than 
painter.  The  French  peasant  was  his  liero,  the 
romance  of  man  in  nature  his  material.  To  his 
fellow-craftsmen,  his  work  must  always  present 
extraordinary  interest;  for,  while  his  gift  was 
peculiar,  and  his  accomplishment  distinguished, 
there  have  been  few  whose  study  of  reality  has  been 
more  searching  and  profound,  and  few  the  record 
of  whose  observations  is  so  pregnant  with  signifi- 
cance. But,  whether  happily  or  not,  he  did  not 
work  for  his  fellow-craftsmen  alone.  He  elected, 
whether  happily  or  not,  to  be  priest  as  well  as 
picture-maker — to  put  off  in  paint  a  certain  number 
of  ideas  and  sensations  which,  it  may  be,  had  better 
have  been  left  unattempted  save  in  words.  And, 
whether  happily  or  not,  he  touched  the  scenes  of 
that  '  epic  in  the  flat '  which  was  his  legacy  to 
time  with  a  dignity,  a  solemn  passion,  a  quality 
of  fatefulness,  a  sense  of  eternal  issues,  which  lift 
him  to  the  neighbourhood  of  Michelangelo  and 
Beethoven. 

XII 

Charles  Jacque  and  Troyon  are  the  animaliers 

of  modern  landscape.     And  Jacque  has  etched  and 

painted  sheep  and  pigs  and  fowls  as 

iew  have  done  ;  and  if  his  fame  be 
1S13-1894 

not  the  highest,  it  is  high  enough. 

His   sheepfolds   have   little   in   common    with  the 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  71 

solemn  and  moving  visions  of  Millet ;  the  magic  of 
Diaz^  which  transfigures  a  hunt  into  something 
coloured  and  heroic,  is  beyond  him ;  he  is  not  so 
good  a  painter  as  Troyon,  nor  has  he  so  large  and 
true  a  sense  of  landscape.  But  he  has  represented 
the  forms,  the  manners,  the  characters,  the  move- 
ments of  certain  beasts  in  an  environment  of 
light  and  air,  and  with  effects  of  mystery  and 
touches  of  suggestion  that  go  far  to  make  his 
election  sure.     [1888.] 


XIII 

There  were  two  painters  in  Leys.     In  his  earlier 
work — his  studies  of  manners,  and  the  aspects  of 

things  as  they  are — he  was  obviously 

LEYS 
in  sympathy  with  modern  aims,  and 

,  .  1814-1869 

was  able  to  unite  a  fine  atmospheric 

quality  with  masterly  handling  and  genuine  dignity 
of  style.  Some  twelve  years  before  his  death, 
however,  his  manner  changed,  and  he  became  that 
Belgian  Pre-Raphaelite — the  pupil  and  direct  in- 
heritor of  the  Van  Eycks— whom  Dante  Rossetti 
esteemed  to  be  the  greatest,  because  the  most 
original,  master  of  the  century,  and  whom  others 
decline  to  regard  as  anything  but  a  maker  of 
workmanlike  postiches — as  an  artist  utterly  lacking 
in  the  creative  faculty,  and  producing  his  best 
work  under  the  impulse  of  an  inspiration  partly 


72  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

imitative  and  pai'tly  archaeological.  It  is  said  that 
even  in  Belgium^  as  was  shown  by  the  middling 
success  achieved  by  his  work  at  the  Exposition 
Nationale  in  1880,  his  vogue  has  had  its  day  ; 
that  hereafter  he  is  like  to  be  more  generously 
regarded  for  the  personal  quality  of  his  few 
etchings  than  for  the  severe  and  studious  un- 
originality  displayed  in  his  innumerable  pictures  ; 
that  his  best  pupils  resemble  him  least ;  that 
those  who  have  imitated  him  directly  have  done 
nothing  worth  considering.  But,  when  all  is  said 
in  his  disfavour  that  can  be,  there  remains  no  doubt 
that  he  was  a  painter.  His  greater  pictures  are 
marked  by  learning,  finish,  careful  draughtsman- 
ship, ingenious  brushwork.  It  is  true  that  they 
are  deficient  in  essentials ;  often  the  lines  are 
rigid,  the  colour  is  coldly  brilliant,  the  enveloping 
medium  conventional  and  unreal.  But  they  are 
master's  work,  though  the  master  be  not  of 
to-day. 


XIV 

Meissonieb's  pictures  are  innumerable :  all  have 
amazed  the  multitude.      Some   have  commanded 

prices  as  in  the  dream  of  an  opium- 

MEISSONIER         ^.  ^-  ^  ■      n  XT 

eating  artist  in  finance.     Nay,  even 
1815-1891 

spite  itself  has  served  him  ;  for  when 

Mrs.  Mackay  destroyed,  with  divers  circumstances 

of  indignity,  the  portrait  he  had  painted  of  her. 


PROFILES  ROM  ANTIQUES  73 

the  profession  made  haste  to  repair  the  insult  with 
a  banquet  of  honour.  Indeed,  the  felicity  of  his 
half-century  (and  more)  of  self-production  has 
been  imperturbable. 

His  merits  are  obvious  :  so  obvious  that  no  mil- 
lionaire can  go  wrong  with  him.  It  has  been  said 
that  he  paints  great  pictures  on  tiny  canvases ; 
but  to  accept  the  proposition  is  surely  to  have  an 
original  conception  of  greatness.  Again,  it  is 
claimed  for  him  that  he  is  the  heir  of  artists  so 
various  and  so  complete  as  Terburg  and  Mieris  and 
Gerard  Dow  ;  and  again  it  has  to  be  noted  that 
these  men  painted  the  life  they  lived  and  knew, 
while  Meissonier's  world  is  purely  factitious — is 
indeed  a  last  expression  of  that  passion  for  strange 
suits  which  was  a  characteristic  of  Romanticism, 
The  truth  is,  he  is  French  of  the  French : 
French  in  his  care  for  microscopic  detail,  French 
in  his  patient  ingenuity  and  his  conscientious 
disdain  for  what  seems  to  him  bad  work,  French 
in  the  neatness  of  his  ambitions,  French  in  the 
dry,  impersonal  quality  of  his  colour,  the  deftness 
of  his  handiwork,  the  logical  effect  of  his  line, 
the  trim  assurance  of  his  effects.  '  II  a  mieux 
que  personne  le  pittoresque  de  tout  le  monde'; 
and  that  is  why,  in  France  and  out  of  it,  he  seems 
the  culmination  we  know.     [1889.] 


74  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

XV 

Daubigny's    work    was    unequal :    which    is   as 
much  as  to  say  that^  like  Corot,  he  was  successful. 

The   Artist   suffers  in  proportion  as 

DAUBIGNY        4.1       rk     1        •     1  i    r»      u- 

the  Dealer  is  happy  ;  and  Daubigny 
1817-1878 

was    sometimes    careless,    and    could 

on  occasion  be  feeble  and  tame.  But  his  good 
work  is  very  good,  and  must  be  judged  by 
a  standard  only  lower  than  the  highest.  He 
had  a  great  love  for  running  water :  he  passed 
much  of  his  time  in  a  house-boat,  le  Bottin ;  and, 
as  Mr.  Hamerton  has  noted,  for  his  '  intimate 
affection,'  his  ^simple  devotion,'  to  the  river  of  his 
choice,  he  was  '^  rewarded  by  an  insight  into  its 
beauty,'  which,  to  compare  him  for  a  moment  with 
the  famous  Englishman  who  had  painted  the  Seine 
before  him,  was  entirely  wanting  in  Turner.  These 
qualities  of  ^intimate  affection  '  and  'simple  devo- 
tion '  are  characteristic  of  Daubigny — are  what,  in 
the  analysis  of  his  individuality,  is  most  readily 
disengaged  ;  and  it  is,  I  think,  from  their  expres- 
sion that  his  art  derives  its  peculiar  savour.  His 
imagination  is  of  an  inferior  strain  to  Rousseau's; 
he  has  elegance,  distinction,  charm,  but  not  in  the 
supreme  degree  that  Corot  has  tliem ;  he  is  a 
pleasing  colourist,  where  Diaz  is  a  great  one  ;  his 
technical  accomplishment  is  admirable,  but  it 
would  be  waste  of  words  to  compare  it  to  the 
macstria  of  Courbet.     Yet  the  sanity  and  content- 


PROFILES  ROM  ANTIQUES  75 

nient  of  his  regard  for  nature,  his  innocent  and 
grateful  confidence,  as  of  a  happy  and  not  too 
masterful  or  curious  husband — these  are  his  own. 
He  is  perhaps  the  least  of  the  great  Romantic 
brood ;  but  he  belongs  to  it,  and  his  achievement, 
from  however  lofty  a  level  it  be  considered,  and  by 
whatever  canons  it  be  tried,  is  safe  from  oblivion 
and  superior  to  disparagement. 


XVI 

Medalled  in  1851  and  1852,  the  late  Edouard 
Frere  was  decorated  in  1855  ;  he  was  discovered  by 
Mr.   Ruskin,  who  likened  his  colour 

to  Rembrandt's,  and   remarked  that 
,      ,      .        ,      .  1    ,  .  1  ,        ,  1S19-1886 

he  painted  with  his  soul,  and  com- 
bined '^the  depth  of  Wordsworth,  the  grace  of 
Reynolds,  and  the  holiness  of  Angelico ' ;  he  sold 
himself  for  twenty  years  to  a  Brussels  dealer.  In 
a  word,  he  made  his  fortune,  and,  applauded  every- 
where, was  especially  successful  in  England  and 
the  United  States.  The  long  list  of  his  pictures, 
which  have  been  reproduced  by  every  sort  of 
process,  is  hard  reading. 

He  is  in  every  sense  of  the  term  a  popular  artist. 
His  talent— originally  simple,  pleasing,  sincere — 
could  not  withstand  the  influence  of  the  enterpris- 
ing Dealer  and  the  unenlightened  Buyer.  It  is 
easy  enough  to    '  wallow  in  the  pathetic ' ;    and, 


76  VIEWS  AND  REVIEV\^S 

as  Frere  discovered,  it  is  not  less  profitable  than 
it  is  easy.  On  the  other  hand,  his  good  work 
is  quite  good.  Mr.  Ruskin's  enthusiasm  is  not  in 
these  days  easy  to  understand ;  and  the  question 
whether  Frere  did  or  did  not  '  paint  with  his  soul ' 
has  ceased  to  have  any  special  interest.  But  there 
is  no  doubt  that  he  had  character,  expression,  a 
certain  grace,  a  thin  vein  of  feeling.  In  the  be- 
ginning, too,  he  painted  much  from  nature,  and 
showed  himself  by  no  means  indifferent  to  the 
practice  of  his  great  contemporaries.  Perhaps  the 
worst  that  can  be  said  of  him  is  that,  a  senti- 
mentalist himself,  he  exaggerated  his  defects  for 
the  pleasure  of  a  sentimental  public. 


XVII 

He  was  a  friend   of   Rousseau,  with  whom  he 
painted   for    some    time    at    Barbizon,    and    who 
described  him   as   'a  Zoroastrian' — 
as  '  un  Parsis  enchante'  de  la  lumiere 
orientale.'       You     read     in    Sensier 
how    he    brought    a    famous    old    windmill — the 
'Moulin  de  la  Galette' — from  Montmartre,  which 
is  one  of  the  cradles  of  modern  landscape,  with  a 
view  to  preserving  it  as  a  relic,  and  of  transporting 
it  to  Barbizon,  and  rebuilding  it  for  use  as  a  studio. 
The  plan  fell  through,  or  there  might  be  some- 
thing to   say   of    Rousseau's    influence    upon  its 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  77 

author.  As  it  is,  the  pair  have  little  in  common 
save  their  deliji^ht  in  travel  and  the  exploration 
of  sites.  For  Ziem,  though  he  proceeds  from  a 
great  school,  is  by  no  means  a  great  painter.  His 
manner  is  facile,  elegant,  engaging ;  his  colour 
agreeable  and  decorative ;  his  observation  rather 
superficial  than  searching ;  his  sentiment  neither 
moving  nor  profound.  But  he  has  the  gift  of 
charm  ;  and  his  rendering  of  his  impressions  of 
nature  is  seldom  found  wanting  in  some  qualities 
of  painting.     [1888.] 


XVIII 

Born  in  Marseilles,   Monticelli  was  a  pupil  of 
Raymond  Aubert  (1781-1857),   who   made   him    a 
devotee  of  line,  a  fanatic  of  Raphael 
and  Ingres.     His   conversion   began  -m^i-i 

(it  is  said)  before  a  Delacroix,  and 
was  completed  by  the  influence  and  example  of 
Diaz,  in  whose  neighbourhood,  in  Paris,  he  lived 
for  some  years,  and  whose  manner  he  mimicked 
with  such  spirit  and  intelligence  that  his  work  was 
often  sold  for  his  master's.  Returning  south,  he 
painted  steadily,  sold  as  fast  as  he  produced,  and 
amused  himself  with  all  his  strength.  It  is  the 
nature  of  the  Provencal,  as  Daudet  showed,  to 
admire  what  is  eccentric,  noisy,  personal,  vacant ; 
and    Monticelli — handsome,    vigorous,    eloquent, 


78  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

persuasive^  uncommon — was  of  all  painters  the  one 
for  Provence.  His  fame  grew  legendary :  he  was 
not  the  lawful  son  of  a  gauger,  but  a  bastard  of 
the  Gonzagas ;  the  great  Diaz  had  secluded  him 
for  many  years  to  steal  the  secret  of  his  colour ; 
and  so  on  :  till  there  was  not  his  like  in  the  length 
of  the  Rhone  Valley.  His  story  has  been  but 
vaguely  told  ;  but  it  seems  that  to  this  period  of 
triumph  there  succeeded  one  of  desperate  reverses, 
for  which  nobody  was  responsible  but  Mouticelli 
himself.  A  second  sojourn  in  Paris,  during  which 
the  painter  was  reduced  to  the  necessity  of  selling 
his  pictures  from  the  pavement,  and  herding  at 
night  with  vagabonds  in  waste  lands  and  empty 
houses,  ended  in  flight  before  the  advance  of  Von 
Moltke.  Monticelli  had  not  only  to  tramp  it  to 
Marseilles,  but  for  six-and-thirty  days  to  paint  his 
way  from  place  to  place.  Settling  in  his  native 
city,  he  adopted  his  final  manner,  and  stood  re- 
vealed as  the  painter  of  pure  sensations,  the  colourist 
for  colour's  sake,  who  has  perplexed  and  scandalised 
so  many  critics.  He  gave  the  rein  to  his  faculty 
of  improvisation,  producing  a  picture  a  day,  and 
selling  his  work  for  whatever  it  would  bring.  And 
year  by  year  the  paint  grew  thicker  and  less 
significant,  the  harmonic  instinct  more  eccentric 
and  uncertain,  the  intellectual  quality  more  childish 
and  obscure.  It  is  said  that,  like  Musset,  he 
took  to  the  worst  drink  of  all — that  his  rare  and 
admirable  temperament  was  wrecked  in  absinthe ; 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  79 

it  seems  certain  that  in  Iiinij  as  in  so  many  of  the 
imperfectly  gifted,  the  sensualist  got  and  kept  the 
upper  hand  of  the  artist.  For  some  time  before 
the  end  they  were  but  few  who  knew  if  he  were 
alive ;  his  '  painted  music,'  his  clangours  of  bronze 
and  gold  and  scarlet,  his  triumphs  of  unrepresenta- 
tive effect,  had  profited  him  so  little. 

The  be-all  and  end-all  of  painting  with  him 
was  colour.  A  craftsman  of  singular  accom- 
plishment, to  tint  and  tone  he  yet  subordinated 
drawing,  character,  observation — three-fourths  of 
art.  Delacroix  and  Turner  used,  it  is  said,  to 
amuse  themselves  with  arrangements  in  silks  and 
sugar-plums  ;  and  what  they  did  in  jest,  or  by  way 
of  experiment,  was  done  by  the  Marseillais  in 
sober  earnest,  and  as  the  last  word  of  Art.  True 
it  is  that  he  has  a  magic — there  is  no  other  word 
for  it — of  his  own  :  that  there  are  moments  when 
his  work  is  infallibly  decorative  as  a  Persian  crock 
or  a  Japanese  brocade  ;  that  there  ai-e  others  when 
there  is  audible  in  these  volleys  of  paint,  these 
orchestral  explosions  of  colour,  a  strain  of  human 
interest,  a  note  of  mystery  and  romance,  some  hint 
of  an  appeal  to  the  mind.  As  a  rule,  however, 
his  art  is  purely  sensuous.  His  fairy  meadows  and 
enchanted  gardens  are  so  to  speak  '^that  sweet 
word  Mesopotamia'  in  two  dimensions:  their 
parallel  in  literature  is.  the  verse  that  one  reads  for 
the  sound's  sake  only — in  which  there  is  rhythm, 
colour,  music,  everything  but  meaning.     If  this  be 


80  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

paintin^j  then  is  Moiiticelli's  the  greatest  of  the 
century.  If  it  be  not — if  painting  be  something 
more  than  dabbling  exquisitely  with  material — 
then  are  these  fantasies  materialised,  these 
glimpses  of  the  romance  of  colour,  no  more  than 
the  beginnings  of  pictures — the  caprices  of  a  man 
of  genius  gone  wrong. 

Upon  the  present  generation — which  delights  to 
confuse  one  art  with  another :  which  must  have 
descriptive  music,  and  will  only  take  an  interest  in 
pictures  that  are  disguised  literature — the  influence 
for  good  of  Monticelli,  of  painting  reduced  to  its 
simplest  elements,  is  not  a  thing  to  be  despised. 
Man's  capacity  for  enjoyment  is  limited ;  his 
capacity  of  idiosyncrasy — his  hobby-horsical  capacity 
— is  not ;  and  it  is  odds  but  if  he  feel  in  all  its 
fulness  the  vague  magic  of  Monticelli,  he  may 
think  himself  superior  to  the  more  varied  and  more 
complex  enchantment  of  Raphael  and  Rubens. 
In  art  as  in  life,  the  undue  development  of  a 
special  faculty  is  fatal  to  the  general  growth.  And 
what  is  true  of  those  who  make  is  true  tenfold  of 
those  who  only  admire  and  feel.  Where  the  Artist 
only  breaks  his  shins,  the  Amateur  is  pretty  certain 
to  break  his  neck 

XIX 

There  is  no  painter  of  these  times  whose 
work  is  better  known,  or  has  been  more  liberally 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  81 

rewarded.     In  colour,  draughtsmanship,  the  tech- 
nique   of  art,    he    is   the  type    of  the   Complete 
Academician.     To  such  as  take  their 
cue  from  Velasquez  and  Rembrandt 
he  is  only  (as  some  one  said  of  some 
one  else)  '  a  man  of  letters  who  has  deviated  into 
paint '  ;   but  even  they  are  fain   to  acknowledge 
his    wonderful   cleverness,   to    accept    his    advice 
in   archaeology   and   his   inventions    in    character 
and  incident,  and  to  admit  that,  if  what  ought  to 
be  expressed  in  words  be,  ipsoj'acto,  appropriate 
to    expression    in    pigment,    then    is    he    beyond 
dispute  a  painter.     [1889.] 


XX 

Like  Millet,  Jules  Breton  paints  the  figure  in 
its  relation  to  landscape,  and  he  paintii  it  with  a 
view  to  the  pictorial   expression   of  JULES 

its    innate    significance     and    senti-  BEETON 

ment.       But    he     has     neither    the  1827 

strength  nor  the  subtlety  of  his  exemplar :  he 
is  lacking  alike  in  Millet's  dignity  of  style 
and  in  Millet's  mastery  of  material  and  of 
fact.  He  is  the  poet-in-paint  of  the  Breton 
femme  des  champs,  and  his  record  of  her  aspects 
and  her  qualities  is  always  emphatic  in  terms  and 
a  thought  too  sentimental  in  feeling  and  effect. 
Still,  his  intention  is  generally  grandiose,  and — 

p 


82  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

while  his  colour  is  rather  impei'sonal  than  not, 
and  his  handling  not  more  than  well  educated 
and  correct — his  results  are  sometimes  marked 
by  real  solemnity  of  emotion  and  propriety  of 
utterance.     [1889.] 

XXI 

Vollon,  in  water-colours  as  in  oils,  is  a  master- 
craftsman.        His     colour    is    rich,    spontaneous, 
and  individual,   his  drawing  at  once 
suggestive   and  exact ;    while  in  his 
brush-work — large,  vigorous,  expres- 
sive— there   is   the   gusto    of    the    born    painter. 
Withal,  his  range  is  wide.     The  Femme  du  Pallet, 
the  Pierre  Piachat  (1868),  the  Espagnol  (1878),  are 
essays  in  the  presentment  of  human  character  and 
the    human    form  ;    the    Port    de   la    Joliette   is   a 
picture  of  moving  ships  and  blue  water,  of  sunshine 
and  sea  air  and  marine  architecture.     But  his  best 
work  has  been  done  in  still-life.     In  man  and  in 
landscape  there  is  always  character,  and  there  is 
always  form  :  they  possess  an  interest  apart  from 
that  of  paint ;  it  is  enough  to  show  them  as  they 
are    by   means    of    accurate    drawing   and    repre- 
sentative   colour.       The    case    is   far    other   with 
flowers  and  fruit,  with  copper  stewpans  and  joints 
of   meat   and   the   textures   of   fur   and   feather. 
Either  they  must  be  left  alone,  or  they  must  be 
pictorially    seen     and     pictorially    treated.       To 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  83 

render  the  facts  of  them  grain  by  grain^  or  hair 
by  hair^  or  petal  by  petal,  is  to  play  a  losing 
match  with  the  camera.  Imitation  for  its  own 
sake  is  the  basest  of  aims,  and  the  pursuit  of  it 
can  have  but  the  meanest  of  results.  In  Vollon's 
art,  as  in  Chardin's,  the  quality  of  literalism  is 
the  last  of  which  the  artist  has  dreamed.  He 
sees  and  renders  his  subjects  as  a  painter  pure 
and  simple — as  parts  of  a  whole  whose  other 
components  are  immaterial  and  intangible.  The 
question  with  him  is  not  one  of  textures  and 
surfaces,  but  one  of  the  presentation  of  light,  the 
suggestion  of  air,  the  differentiation  of  values, 
the  development  of  plane  on  plane  and  gradation 
after  gradation  in  obedience  to  the  requirements 
of  modelling,  the  pictorial  record  (in  a  word)  of 
the  innumerable  operations  of  the  environing 
medium  of  whatever  exists  as  material  for  art. 
To  put  the  matter  in  other  terms,  he  stands  in 
the  same  relation  to  the  successors  of  Constable 
as  Chardin  stood  to  those  of  Hobbema  and  De 
Hooch.  He  treats  his  armours  and  his  piles  of 
fish,  his  bowls  of  strawberries  and  dead  birds  and 
groups  of  pots,  precisely  as  an  open-air  painter 
deals  with  clouds  and  distances  and  trees.  The 
sun  shines  on  them,  and  the  wind  blows ;  they  are 
localised  in  space,  and  shown  together  with  the 
facts  of  their  unseen  yet  all-important  envelop- 
ment. His  still-lifes,  indeed,  have  been  described 
as  *des  paysages  d'inte'rieur,'  and  as  they  have  the 


84  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

essential  qualities  of  good  modern  landscape,  the 
phrase  is  neither  infelicitous  nor  untruthful. 


XXII 

His  art  is  a  development  of  Romanticism.  His 
portrait  groups  are  modern  in  every  sense  of  the 
FANTIN-  word  ;    his  allegorical  pictures  have 

LATOUR  a  certain  smack  of  18.30  and  of  the 

1836  Courbet  of  the  Atelier  du  Peintre ; 

he  is  a  student  of  atmosphere  and  light,  and 
has  recorded  his  impressions  in  appropriate  and 
novel  terms.  Of  late  years  his  manner  has  be- 
come a  little  hard  and  dry,  and  his  care  for 
detail  somewhat  exaggerated.  But  he  is  always 
a  craftsman,  and  in  his  best  work  he  is  a  genuine 
colourist  and  something  of  a  poet.     [1888.] 


XXIII 

He  began,  with  Champfleury,  as  a  '  realist ' ;  but 

he  is  better  described  as  '  an  Old  Master  belated,' 

and   from   the   first    the  description 

fitted.      It  is  only  in  sentiment  and 
1837 

choice  of  subject  that  he  is  a  modern. 

The  developments  of  Constable  and  his  successors 
can  scarce  be  said  to  exist  for  him.  In  his  treat- 
ment of  the  figure  he  is  inspired  by  the  example 


PROFILES  ROiMANTlQUES  85 

of  Holhein  and  Jehan  P'oucquet ;  in  his  land- 
scapes he  is  a  pupil  of  Nicolas  Poussin ;  he 
touches  hands  with  Van  Dyck  and  Rembrandt 
in  his  etchings,  and  with  \'ittore  Pisano  in  his 
medals.  His  colour,  again  —  severe,  solemn, 
chastened— is  modern  in  no  sense  of  the  word ; 
and  the  contrast  between  himself  and  his  contem- 
poraries is  made  more  trenchant  by  the  austerity 
of  his  ideals,  his  disdain  of  trick,  the  sustained 
dignity,  the  lofty  sobriety,  the  austere  distinction 
of  his  art.  It  has  been  said  of  him,  and  with 
truth,  that  he  lacks  charm,  and  seeks  and  finds 
too  exclusively  the  beauty  of  ugliness.  But  it  is 
also  true  that  he  is  a  consummate  artist,  whose 
influence  for  good  can  hardly  fail  to  be  enduring, 
heartening,  and  profound.     [1888.] 

XXIV 

Among  those  who  interested  him  were  Corot, 
Courbet,  Fantin-Latour,  Daubigny  ;  but  the  prime 
favourite  of  all  was  Edouard  Manet  BASTIEN- 
(1833-1886).       Manet  had  developed  LEPAGE 

the  theory  of  what  is  called  impres-  1848-1884 

sionnisme,  and  was  struggling  to  paint  things 
as  he  saw  them,  without  chiaroscuro  and  with  an 
exact  regard  for  the  action  upon  his  subjects  of 
the  '  diffused  light '  in  which  they  were  enveloped, 
and  by  which  their  shapes  were  modified  and 
revealed.     Under  this  same  '^ diffused  light'  it  was 


8()  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

that  the  younger  man  considered  Nature  : 
Nature  who,  in  the  phrase  of  Mr.  W.  C.  Browuell, 
was  '  rarely  or  never  his  material/  but  '  nearly 
always  in  exact  strictness  his  model.'  It  was  in 
deference  to  its  requirements,  and  with  a  fearless 
trust  in  the  results  of  its  operation  upon  the  cold 
sunlight  and  the  grey-green  leafage  of  his  own 
department  of  the  Meuse,  that  he  produced  his 
most  striking  and  most  personal  effects ;  in  the 
pursuit  of  it  he  grew  blind  to  ideal  beauty,  and 
was  betrayed  into  the  perpetuation  of  a  novel 
and  unlovely  mannerism  of  tone  and  colour  and 
aspect.  But  his  appreciation  of  its  possibilities 
was  so  just,  and  his  use  of  them  so  ingenious 
and  suggestive,  that  his  work  would  have  been 
remarkable  in  the  presence  of  these  elements 
alone ;  and  in  some  other  directions  his  endow- 
ment was  of  the  best.  To  a  sense  of  character, 
alike  in  landscape  and  in  humankind,  of  peculiar 
apprehensiveness  and  delica<^y  he  added  a  singular 
capacity  for  expression  :  his  brush-work  was  broad 
or  exquisite  at  will ;  he  could  handle  his  materials 
with  an  accomplishment  uncommon  even  in  France, 
and  with  that  touch  of  style  which  stamps  the  born 
painter.  It  was  not  long  ere  he  began  to  tell  in 
art.  His  health  was  deplorable,  but  he  painted 
steadily,  and  from  the  famous  Annonciation  aux 
bergers  (1875)  he  did  nothing  that  was  not  closely 
scrutinised  and  eagerly  discussed,  and  little  but 
was  applauded  and  admired.     In  1877  he  exhibited 


PROFILES  ROMANTIQUES  87 

the  Foi7is,  in  1878  the  Andre  Theuriet,  in  1879 
the  Sarah  Bernhardt,  in  1880  the  Jeanne  d' Arc,  in 
1881  the  Mendiant  and  the  Albert  Wolff,  the  Pere 
Jacques  in  1882,  the  Amour  au  village  in  1883,  the 
Forge  in  1884  ;  and,  though  he  died  at  six-and- 
thirty,  he  had  lived  long  enough  to  found  a 
school,  ai  1  to  take  rank  with  the  masters  of  his 
time. 

'  He  is  not  enough  in  love  with  beauty,'  says  the 
fine  critic  already  quoted  :  '  he  insists  too  much  on 
what  is  ugly  in  Nature,  he  is  too  uncompromising 
in  his  refusal  to  adorn  in  the  slightest  degree  the 
most  forbidding  subject ' ;  and  if  the  'e'cole  re'aliste- 
impressionniste  '  be  visited  with  obloquy,  that,  and 
that  only,  is  the  reason.  There  is  little  to  add  to 
this,  Bastien-Lepage  is  no  doubt  responsible  for 
the  existence,  at  first  or  second  hand,  of  a  vast 
amount  of  superfluous  unbeautifulness,  and  for  the 
oppression  of  much  latter-day  art — his  own  achieve- 
ment, that  is,  and  that  of  his  pupils — under  a 
heavy  burden  of  mannerism.  But  he  was  a  faith- 
ful and  passionate  student ;  his  technical  mastery 
was  in  a  sort  complete  ;  the  least  lovely  of  his 
works  is  removed  from  even  the  suspicion  of 
vulgarity  by  a  curious  distinction  of  style ;  he 
is  always  found  to  have  the  abiding  virtue  of 
sincerity.  Alike  in  landscape  and  in  portraiture 
he  survives  as  the  author  of  a  new  departure. 


FIVE    DUTCHMEN 


He  is  a  painter  of  daylight — above  all,  of  day- 
light as  it  were  domesticated  :    of  its  appearance 

when  it  is  lodged  between  the  con- 
BOSBOOM  ^j^gg   ^f  f^^j.   ^gjjg^    j^g  gfl^g^jt    ypojj 

architectural  features  and  the  colours 
and  the  lines  of  furniture.  His  early  work  is 
only  exact  and  literal :  his  subjects  were  mostly 
church  interiors,  which  he  rendered  with  laborious 
accuracy  of  detail  and  minuteness  of  finish.  Then, 
having  disciplined  his  hand  and  mastered  his 
material,  he  became  a  painter :  his  touch  grew 
free  and  bold,  his  drawing  instinct  with  expres- 
sion, his  treatment  energetic  and  personal,  his 
colour  refined,  distinguished,  and  suggestive  ;  and 
he  began  to  convey  in  terms  of  exquisite  sobriety 
his  sense  of  the  all-pervading  influences  of  atmo- 
sphere and  daylight.  Working  indifferently  in 
water-colours  and  in  oils,  he  attained  to  a  singular 
mastery  of  both  ;  and  though  it  has  not  always 
pleased  him  to  do  well  in  either,  and  he  is  respon- 
sible for  a  great  number  of  bad  pictures,  it  may 
83 


FIVE  DUTCHMEN  89 

be  said  of  him  that  his  best  is  unique  in  modern 
painting.  None,  perhaps,  has  had  so  keen  and  just 
an  apprehension  of  the  plastic  quality  of  an  interior 
as  Johannes  Bosboom  ;  and  none  has,  perhaps,  re- 
vealed so  much  of  its  pictorial  significance,  or 
struck  from  its  suggestions  a  note  of  such  peculiar 
yet  engaging  romance.  Of  course  he  is  a  develop- 
ment ;  for  is  not  Holland  the  birthplace  of  painted 
light  ?  But  he  is  so  little  the  slave  of  his  greater 
predecessors,  of  Rembrandt  as  of  Pieter  de  Hooch, 
that  he  eliminates  all  human  interest  from  his  work. 
It  is  without  reference  to  their  relation  to  man, 
it  is  wholly  for  themselves,  that  he  paints  his 
cottage  corners  and  his  vast  and  lofty  aisles. 
To  him  they  are  all  sufficient :  as  the  troubled 
skies  and  green  meadows  of  his  native  Suffolk 
were  to  Constable,  as  to  Corot  the  quiet  waters 
and  the  dawning  skies  of  Ville  d'Avray.  And  his 
sole  mission  is  to  present  them  as  he  sees  them 
through  the  exquisite  gradations  of  their  aerial 
envelope.     [1888.] 


II 

He  is  essentially  a   painter  of  man  and  man's 
emotions.       Whatever   their    intrinsic   merit,   his 
landscapes    and    interiors    are    only 
settings  for  the  human  figure  ;  how- 
ever justly  observed  and  rendered, 
his  effects  of  light  are  always  subordinate  to,  and 


90  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

illustrative  of,  an  interest  of  character  and  senti- 
ment. He  is  a  good  painter  of  popular  subjects  ; 
and  it  is  not  nearly  so  much  because  he  is  a  good 
painter  as  because  his  subjects  are  popular  that 
his  renown  is  world-wide,  and  there  is  scarce  a 
gallery  of  modern  pictures  but  contains  an  example 
of  his  work.  It  is  to  his  honour — it  attests  the 
incorruptible  quality  of  his  artistic  sincerity — 
that,  with  all  the  applause  that  has  been  his, 
he  should  have  remained  his  own  severest  critic, 
and  have  gone  on  improving  as  he  has  gone  on 
painting.  First  and  last,  however,  his  real 
master  has  been,  not  Kruseman  nor  Picot  but, 
the  magician  of  The  Night  Watch  and  the  Syndics  ; 
and  to  be  maintained  at  such  height  of  emulation 
is  to  find  rest  impossible.  This  has  been  the 
happy  fortune  of  Israels.  His  early  work — a 
trifle  violent  in  colour,  somewhat  strained  in  com- 
position, in  illumination  arbitrary,  in  execution 
laboured  and  painful — is  only  so  much  unskilled 
and  second-hand  Rembrandt.  But  he  was  hard  to 
please ;  and  it  is  the  practice  of  years  that  has 
made  him  the  capable  craftsman  of  his  greater 
pictures.  Here  his  colour  is  individual,  spon- 
taneous, sometimes  even  rich,  and  his  brush-work 
large  and  vigorous ;  his  drawing,  if  a  little  loose 
and  vague— as  of  a  Millet  indifferent  to  Poussin 
and  unconscious  of  the  antique — has  a  quality 
of  suggestiveness ;  his  light  is  clear,  fluent,  im- 
palpable,   remote    from   paint ;    his  shadows  are 


FIVE  DUTCHMEN  91 

floating  and  luminous  ;  often  mannered,  and  often 
naively  naturalistic,  his  compositions  are  simply 
and  effectively  pictorial.  It  is  small  wonder  if 
in  Holland  he  have  heen  a  leader  in  the  revival 
of  painting. 

He  is  a  painter  of  pathos.  The  emotion  is  one 
easily  strained  ;  and  always  to  produce  it  aright 
and  of  the  purest  quality  is  in  these  days  impos- 
sible. It  is  ail-too  apt  to  degenerate  into  mawkish- 
ness  and  twaddle ;  it  is  subject  to  the  taint  of 
affectation  ;  when  its  flow  is  readiest  and  fullest, 
there  oftentimes  is  its  expression  least  to  be  en- 
couraged— for  to  '  pipe  the  eye '  is  only  now  and 
then  a  creditable  proceeding,  and  to  pipe  the  eye 
on  any  and  every  provocation  is  to  put  oneself  out- 
side the  pale  of  art,  and  stand  forth  the  fit  exponent 
of  no  more  in  nature  than  is  feeble  and  contemptible. 
Even  with  Shakespeare  the  thing  is  sometimes 
theatrical ;  even  with  Dickens  it  is  often  unvera- 
cious  ;  and  for  Millet,  can  one  always  acquit  him 
of  a  community  of  aim  with  Edouard  Frere.'' 
Israels  is  neither  Millet  nor  Dickens  —  still 
less  is  he  Shakespeare ;  and  his  exercises  in 
the  pathetic  are  very  often  merely  repellent. 
As  a  rule  his  appeal  is  ail-too  obvious.  He 
makes  no  secret  of  his  design  upon  your  tears. 
On  the  contrary,  he  asks  you  to  sit  down  and  have 
a  good  cry  with  him  ;  and  he  tells  you  plainly, 
not  only  that  it  will  do  you  good  but,  that  you 
will  really  enjoy  it — that  you  will  find  it  a  luxury 


92  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

and  a  lesson  in  one.  Sometimes  it  is  impossible 
not  to  decline  his  invitation— not  to  resent  it  with 
scoffs  and  sneers.  But  on  occasion  his  pathos  is 
touched^  both  in  conception  and  in  execution, 
with  a  certain  homespun  dignity  ;  and  then  he  is 
irresistible.  He  is  not  a  great  poet  like  Millet : 
not  in  idea  nor  in  utterance  has  he  ever  a  touch 
of  the  heroic.  But  he  has  realised  that  it  is  man's 
destiny  to  grieve  and  to  endure,  and  he  often 
(Conveys  this  moral  in  terms  that  go  straight  to 
his  hearers'  hearts.     [1888.] 

Ill 

At  liis  highest  he  produces  work  that  takes 
rank  with  the  best  of  its  time.  He  is  not  always 
JACOBUS  ^  poet :   the  tone   of  what   he  does 

MARIS  is  commonly  that  of  prose.     But  the 

1837-1899  prose  (to    carry   on    the    metaphor) 

is  master's  work :  it  is  stamped  with  a  noble 
sincerity ;  in  vigour  and  directness  and  variety 
it  is  not  just  now  to  be  surpassed.  In  his 
pictures  of  man  there  is  very  little  human  interest. 
The  figure  is  considered  and  handled  much  as 
though  it  were  a  piece  of  still  life — in  relation, 
that  isj  to  its  aerial  envelope — and  not  for  the 
sake  of  any  intrinsic  element  of  character  or  senti- 
ment ;  so  that  the  result  is  only  pictorially  good, 
and  appeals  to  none  save  an  iEsthetic  emotion.  It 
is  otherguess  work  with  his  landscape.  Not  only 
is  it  large    in   treatment,   dignified   in  style,  and 


FIVE  DUTCHMEN  93 

finely,  albeit  simply  decorative  in  eifect.  You  see 
at  once  that  here  the  man's  heart  and  brain  are  in 
entire  and  perfect  consonance  :  he  has  felt  as  well 
as  understood  his  subject,  and  the  record  is  affect- 
ing as  the  experience  was  passionate.  He  is  one 
of  nature's  intimates ;  and  his  expression  of  the 
peculiar  sentiment  of  this  or  of  that  of  her  in- 
numerable moods  is  scarce  less  just  than  his 
rendering  of  its  special  aspect  is  accurate.  His 
skies  are  a  case  in  point.  None  since  Constable, 
the  ancestor  with  whom  to  my  mind  he  has  most 
in  common,  has  rendered  clouds — the  mass  and 
the  gait  of  them,  the  shadow  and  the  light,  the 
mystery  and  the  wonder  and  the  beauty — with 
such  an  insight  into  essentials,  and  such  a  com- 
mand of  appropriate  and  moving  terns  as  Jacobus 
Maris.  He  paints  them,  not  solid  and  still  but, 
active  in  space,  full  of  the  daylight  and  the  wind, 
menacing  with  storm,  or  charged  with  the  bene- 
diction of  the  rain  ;  and  they  look  upon  you 
from  his  canvases  like  the  living  children  of  the 
weather  that  they  are.     [1888.] 

IV 

Mauve  may  not  be  ranked  with  Troyou.     He  is 
much  less  vigorous  and  less  original ;    he  is    not 

nearly  so  great  a  painter  ;  his  work 

.  ,.■■    .  ..  MAUVE 

IS  not  so  solid  in  execution  nor  so 

1  .  .  nr  .^11  183S-ISS8 

decorative  111  effect.      On  the  other 

hand    his    draughtsmanship   is   sound,   his   brush- 


94  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

work  full  of  gusto,  his  colour  quite  his  own  ;  to  a 
right  sense  of  nature  and  a  mastery  of  certain 
atmospheric  effects  he  unites  a  genuine  strain  of 
poetry.  In  pure  landscape  he  is  often  excellent : 
he  paints  it  with  a  taking  combination  of  know- 
ledge and  feeling.  His  treatment  of  animals  is 
at  once  judicious  and  affectionate.  He  is  careful 
to  render  them  in  relation  to  their  aerial  sur- 
roundings ;  but  he  has  recognised  that  they  too 
are  creatures  of  character  and  sentiment,  and 
he  loves  to  paint  them  in  their  relations  to 
each  other  and  to  man.  The  sentiment  is  never 
forced,  the  characterisation  never  strained,  the 
drama  never  exorbitant :  the  proportions  in  which 
they  are  introduced  are  so  nicely  adjusted  that 
the  pictorial,  the  purely  artistic,  quality  of  the 
work  is  undiminished.  To  Troyon  animals  were 
objects  in  a  landscape  ;  to  Mauve  they  are  that 
and  something  more.  His  old  horses  are  their 
old  masters'  friends ;  his  cows  are  used  to  the 
girls  who  tend  them  ;  his  sheep  feed  as  though 
they  knew  each  other,  and  liked  it.  In  a  word, 
his  use  of  the  dramatic  element  is  primarily 
artistic ;  and  it  is  with  something  of  a  blush 
that  one  compares  his  savoir-vivre  with  the  bad 
manners  of  some  animal  painters  nearer  home. 
[1888.] 


FIVE  DUTCHMEN  95 


V 


Matthew  Maris  is  an  artist  of  rare  parts  and 
singular  accomplishment,  averse  from  publicity 
and  contemptuous  of  distinction,  and  MATTHYS 
content  to   paint  for  himself  and    a  MARIS 

few  friends.     He  mastered  his  craft  1839 

almost  at  starting  ;   and  his  earliest  work  is  dis- 
tinguished   by    sanity   of    aim    and    completeness 
of  method.       But  it  is  not   in  his   earliest   work 
that  he  can  be  rightly  savoured.      He  has  in  him 
a  vein  of  poetry,  a   strain  of  imagination,  that  is 
none  the  less  intense  for  being  somewhat  morbid  ; 
and    he   was   quick   to   part   company    with   solid 
earth,  and  to  become  a  painter  of  dreams.     He  is 
far  less  concerned  with  the  outward  show  of  things 
than  with  their  spiritual  shapes,  their  attribute  of 
mystery,    their   essence   and    innate   significance; 
and  he  expresses  as  much  of  these  as  is  revealed 
to  him  in  terms  of  strange  and  peculiar  beauty. 
His   view   of  life  is  melancholy;   his  sympathies 
are  curiously  individual  and  remote  ;  his  humanity 
is    warped,    fantastic ;    his   romance,    for   all   the 
close  and  brooding  passion  of  its  expression,  is  so 
uncommon   as  to  appear  unreal.      But  he  has  a 
magic  of  his  own,  and  to   withstand  his  incanta- 
tions is  impossible.     Their  appeal  is  vague  as  that 
in  certain  of  Heine's  verses  : — 


96  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

Aus  alten  Marchen  winkt  es 

Hervor  mit  weisser  Hand, 
Da  singt  es  und  da  klingt  es 

Von  einem  Zauberland  :— 

and  withal  as  curiously  affecting.  I  do  not  want 
to  strain  the  comparison.  Heine  is  the  most 
human  of  poets ;  Matthew  Maris  is  one  of  the 
least  sexual  of  painters.  But  I  own  that  to 
me  the  Dutchman's  pictures  are  now  and  then 
inevitably  suggestive  of  the  more  fantastic  and 
far-away  of  the  greater  artist's  lyrics.  They  might 
almost  pass  for  illustrations  of  certain  pages  in 
the  Buck  der  Lieder,  just  as  certain  pages  in  the 
Buck  der  Lieder  recall  to  me  with  no  uncertain 
voice  the  unearthly  glamour^  '  the  light  that  never 
was  on  sea  or  land,'  which  shimmers  from  so  much 
of  the  painter's  work.  Here  is  an  instance  of 
what  I  mean  : — 

Im  Zaubergarten  wallen 

Zwei  Buhlen  stumm  und  allein, 

Es  singen  die  Nachtigallen, 
Es  flimmert  der  Mondenschein. 

That,  with  what  follows,  is  a  Matthew  Maris  in 
words. 

Israels  has  described  his  art  as  '  the  fine  gold 
of  Dutch  painting '  ;  and,  being  that,  it  will  always 
be  caviare  to  the  general.  It  may  be,  indeed, 
that  the  half  of  him  will  not  be  told  to  us ;  for 
his  life  is  spent  in  the  pursuit  of  unattainable 
perfections,  and  he  regards  the  most  of  those 
pictures   which   he   consents   to  part  with  as  no 


FIVE  DUTCHMEN  97 

more  than  experiments.  Be  this  as  it  may,  they 
are  good  enough  for  them  that  have  eyes  to  see. 
If  they  proved  no  more,  they  would  still  prove 
that  two  great  and  precious  qualities  are  indisput- 
ably his.  He  has  a  gift  of  exquisite  colour  and 
an  infallible  sense  of  tone.  Of  late  the  former 
potency  has  suffered  change :  his  reveries  have 
grown  sombre  and  sad  ;  he  has  done  with  his  weird 
yet  lovely  combinations  of  magical  blue  and 
ethereal  gold ;  he  paints,  not  dreams  but,  the 
melancholy  ghosts  of  dreams.  But  his  tonality 
is  always  faultless  ;  and  those,  perhaps,  who  have 
caught  the  full  perfume  of  his  subtle  and  peculiar 
genius  will  find  new  charm  in  his  darkening 
mood.     [1888.] 


k 


SOME   LANDSCAPE   PAINTERS 


Nasmyth's   reputation  has   greatly   declined   of 
late  ;  and  the  reasons  are  neither  few  nor  far  to 

seek.     He  had  a  sincere  and  pleasant 

NASMYTH  ~  . ,  4.       1    •      1      J 

sense  or  the  pastoral  ni  landscape : 
1758-1840  ^  .       ,, 

he   was    an    ardent   and   intelligent 

student  of  the  Dutch  masters^  and  he  put  such 
individuality  as  he  had  into  the  convention  which 
they  had  shaped  to  such  lovely  ends ;  he  was 
something  of  an  Eighteenth  Century  poet,  and  his 
liking  for  heauty,  pedestrian  as  it  was,  had  yet  a 
reality  of  life  that  is  still  palpable,  and  a  capacity 
for  respectable  and  decent  expression  that  has 
admirers  even  now.  But,  as  he  was  essentially 
small  in  his  ambitions,  so  was  he  essentially  petty 
in  his  triumphs.  What  he  had  to  say  amounts  to 
nothing  in  particular ;  and,  while  explicit  and 
studied  enough  to  satisfy  the  needs  of  a  certain 
sort  of  literalism,  the  terms  in  which  he  said  it 
are  cold,  formal,  altogether  wanting  in  distinction. 
His  matter,  in  other  words,  is  merely  common- 
place, and  liis  manner,  hard,  'tight,'  niggled 
enough  to  be  inspiring  to  none  save  the  careful 
student  of  facts. 

98 


SOME  LANDSCAPE  PAINTERS  99 


II 

The  last  years  of  Turner's  life  were  a  strange 
and  sordid  mingling  of  dotage  and  uncleanness. 
In   1842  he   exhibited   his  Burial  of 

Sir  David  Wilkie  and  The  Exile  and  TURNER 

1775-1851 
the  Rock  Limpet,  in  1843  his  Ap- 
proach to  Venice  and  his  Sun  of  Venice  going 
to  Sea,  in  1844  the  extraordinary  piece  of  impren- 
sionnisme  known  as  Rain,  Speed,  and  Steam.  To 
some  these  last  works  of  his  are  revelations  of  new 
possibilities  in  art,  while  to  others  they  are  only 
the  outcome  of  a  mind  diseased  and  the  expression 
of  a  colour-faculty  gone  to  physical  decay  and 
ruin.  But,  whatever  the  fact  in  art,  in  life  the 
Turner  of  these  squalid  last  years  was  a  dismal 
monomaniac.  He  had  a  house  in  Queen  Anne 
Street  (for  the  pictures  contained  in  which  he  was 
offered,  and  refused,  an  hundred  thousand  pounds), 
and  that  house  was  kept  by  a  woman  who  had 
begun  to  live  with  him  in  1801  as  a  girl  of  sixteen, 
and  had  gone  on  living  with  him  ever  since  ;  but 
though  she  knew  of  another  retreat  of  his,  she 
had  no  idea  where  it  was,  and  it  was  not  until 
late  in  1851  that  she  was  able  to  identify  her 
master  with  a  certain  '  Puggy  Booth,'  who  was 
thought  to  be  a  retired  Admiral  (Turner  had 
already  been  known  to  pass  himself  off  as  a  Master 
in   Chancery)  who  had   a  house  in   Chelsea,  and 


100  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

lived  there  with  an  old  woman  whose  face  was 
hideous  with  cancer.  He  died  there  some  days 
after  the  identification.  His  will^  which  he  had 
made  himself,  was  a  monument  of  muddled  in- 
expressiveness.  It  was  the  subject  of  years  of 
argument ;  but  in  the  end  it  gave  his  pictures  and 
drawings  to  the  nation^  a  sum  of  £20^000  to  the 
Royal  Academy,  and  the  bulk  of  his  funded 
moneys,  together  with  his  rights  in  engravings, 
to  his  next  of  kin. 

His  life — so  voiceless  and  so  stunted  in  fact,  so 
gross  and  unworthy  in  appearance — has  not  yet 
found  its  Balzac.  His  art,  so  intelligent,  so  appre- 
hensive, so  ambitious  in  its  aims,  so  confused  yet 
so  suggestive  in  its  results — has  been  the  origin  of 
so  much  literature  that  to  admit  that  it  is  art  at  all 
is  getting  difficult,  and  to  assert  that  it  is  not  only 
art  but  great  art  has  become  wellnigh  impossible. 
Turner,  indeed,  belongs  at  this  time  neither  to 
hell  nor  to  heaven,  but  hangs,  like  Mahomet's 
coffin  somewhere — nobody  knows  in  what  degree 
of  altitude — between  the  empyrean  and  the  abyss. 
On  the  one  hand  is  Mr.  Ruskin  with  the  great 
army  of  those  who  think  with  him  ;  and  for  them 
Turner  not  only  resumes  the  excellences  of  Claude, 
the  Poussins,  Ruysdael,  Rembrandt,  Rubens,  Wil- 
son, Crome,  Van  de  Veide,  Gainsborough,  Con- 
stable, but  is  also  Turner,  and  so  the  last  potenti- 
ality— 'the  ultimate  and  consummate  flower' — of 
landscape.      On   the   other   is   the  little   but  in- 


SOME  LANDSCAPE  PAINTERS        101 

creasing  group  which  demands  of  an  artist 
not  personality  but  art,  not  experiment  but 
achievement,  not  riot  but  order,  not  excess  but 
measure,  quality,  perfection  —  not  Turner  and 
Rousseau  but  Claude  and  Corot — and  sees  in  him 
a  man  whose  genius,  to  put  it  metaphorically,  lived 
in  a  castle  with  a  score  of  posterns  and  no  great 
gateway.  To  strike  and  hold  the  balance  between 
the  two  factious  is  impossible.  Turner  has  been 
so  magnificently  over-praised  that,  as  was  in- 
evitable, he  is  just  now — he  will  be  for  some  time 
to  come — the  breaking-point  of  a  great  wave  of 
reaction.  Till  that  wave  has  exhausted  its  energy 
the  very  truth  is  only  to  be  caught  in  splashes. 
Thus  it  is  certain,  as  Mr.  Monkhouse  has  shown, 
that  Turner's  life  was  lived  in  a  series  of  duels  in 
paint  with  other  men  :  that  in  water-colours  he 
studied,  assimilated,  and  improved  upon  the  prac- 
tice of  the  best  of  his  time ;  that  in  oils  he  set 
himself  to  understand,  repeat,  and  do  better  than 
the  best  of  De  Loutherbourg,  Wilson,  Van  de 
Velde,  Titian,  the  Poussins,  Claude,  to  name  but 
these.  But  it  is  by  no  means  so  certain  that,  as 
Mr.  Monkhouse  would  have  us  believe,  he  suc- 
ceeded. It  is  nothing  if  not  doubtful  that  his 
colour-sense  was  ever  anything  but  crude,  antic,  and 
a  little  coarse.  But  his  ingenuity  was  enormous  ; 
his  interest  in  facts  is  scarce  to  be  described ; 
his  dexterity — in  water-colours  anyhow — has  yet 
to    be    surpassed ;     his    treatment    of   Nature  — 


102  VIEWS  AND  REVIEVV^S 

with  its  extraordinary  and  bewildering  combina- 
tion of  an  artistic  yet  arbitrary  regard  for  ideals 
of  composition  and  an  inartistic  and  slavish  re- 
gard for  superfluous  detail — was  personal,  to  say 
the  least ;  he  drew  with  uncommon  neatness  and 
precision,  he  was  curious  in  styles,  he  touched 
upon  a  thousand  hints  of  mystery  and  beauty  and 
romance.  And  the  result  for  him  that  is  enamoured 
of  art — who  looks  upon  paint  as  so  much  visible 
beauty,  and  is  not  concerned  with  its  moral  signific- 
ance or  its  unpictorial  suggestiveness ;  who  sees 
that  Turner's  blues  are  shrewd,  and  his  yellows 
trumpery ;  and  who  is  mad  and  wicked  enough  to 
judge  of  the  literary  quality  of  (say)  The  Exile  and 
the  Rock  Limpet  by  that  of  The  Fallacies  of  Hope — 
the  result,  I  say,  is  rather  negative.  That  Turner 
was  a  great  artist  A  Frosty  Morning,  among  other 
things,  remains  to  show.  That  he  was  ever  a  great 
colourist  is  matter  of  opinion  :  the  facts  are  with 
us  that  latterly  he  grew  colour-blind,  and  that, 
when  it  comes  to  swearing,  the  sensation  of  the 
expert  in  paint  is  every  wliit  as  authoritative  as 
the  practical  testimony  of  the  painter.  That  he 
has  not  entirely  obliterated  the  memory  t>f 
Claude  is  plain  to  any  one  who  can  clear  his  mind 
of  rhetoric,  and  compare  the  two  where  they 
hang  (as  Turner  intended  they  should  hang)  in 
the  National  Gallery.  However  correct  it  be  to 
advance  that  he  was  the  source  of  a  vast  amount  of 
art-criticism,   it  is   uncritical  to    affirm   that    he 


SOME  LANDSCAPE  PAINTERS        103 

founded  a  school  in  painting,  or  that  his  influence 
upon  his  successors  has  been  comparable  in  any 
sense  to  that  which  is  still  being-  exercised  by  Con- 
stable and  by  Crome.  But  it  is  none  the  less  true 
that^  while  on  the  Continent  he  is  not  i^reatly 
esteemed^  among  Ruskin-reading  populations  he  is 
a  kind  of  superstition,  and  commands  higher  prices 
than  any  save  those  among  his  successors  who  are 
the  most  in  fashion.  Also,  his  worst  enemy  has 
been  the  wonderful  man  of  letters  whose  inspira- 
tion he  was  in  the  beginning,  and  whose  care  his 
fame  has  continued  to  be.  There  is  no  such  deadly 
influence  as  excess  of  praise  ;  and  that  Turner  has 
survived  the  enthusiasm  of  Mr.  Ruskin  is  excellent 
argument  for  his  greatness. 


Ill 

CoNSTABLK,  the  most  influential,  and  one  of  the 
greatest,  landscape-painters  of  the  Nineteenth 
Century,  was  born  at  East  Bergholt, 
where  his  father,  Golding  Constable,  ^^^NSTABLE 
a  wealthy  mill-owner,  resided.  He 
was  intended  for  the  Church,  and  went  to  school  at 
Lavenham  and  Dedham  and  elsewhere  ;  but  he  was 
distinguished  in  nothing  save  ^proficiency  in  hand- 
writing' till  late  in  his  'toens,  when,  says  Leslie, 
he  was  found  to  have  become  '  devotedly  fond  of 
painting.'     Golding  Constable  would  seem  to  have 


104  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

divined  the  future,  he  was  so  resolutely  intolerant 
of  the  unkindly  and  fatal  passion  ;  and  his  son, 
whose  only  friend  was  the  village  plumber  (with 
whom  he  used  to  go  out  sketching  from  Nature), 
and  who  was  obliged  to  hire  a  room  that  he  might 
have  a  place  to  paint  in,  was  presently  obliged 
to  compromise,  and,  having  finally  declined  to 
become  a  parson,  to  take  his  place  in  one  or  other 
of  his  father's  mills.  It  was  the  best  he  could 
have  done.  It  was  part  of  his  business  to  watch 
the  weather ;  and  that  he  became  the  greatest 
observer  of  wind  and  cloud  and  rain  yet  known  in 
painting  was  due  in  no  small  means  to  this  for- 
tunate piece  of  tyranny. 

At  this  time  Sir  George  Beaumont  —  Words- 
worth's Beaumont :  Beaumont  of  the  brown  tree — 
was  a  frequent  visitor  to  Dedham,  which  was  his 
mother's  home.  The  Dowager-Lady  Beaumont  and 
Mrs.  Constable  were  friends ;  and  at  the  elder 
lady's  house  John  Constable  was  taken  with  one  of 
the  great  passions — after  nature  and  himself  per- 
hajjs  the  greatest — of  his  life.  Sir  George  was  not 
a  great  painter  ;  but,  as  his  bequests  to  the  National 
Gallery  will  show,  he  had  an  admirable  taste  in 
pictures.  Devoted,  above  all,  to  Claude  and 
Wilson,  he  was  accustomed  to  carry  the  Hcujur 
of  the  former  master  about  with  him  wherever  he 
went,  and,  in  making  his  acquaintance.  Constable 
made  that  of  the  prince  of  landscape-painters  as 
well.      His  taste  in  landscape,  it  is  to  be  noted. 


SOME  LANDSCAPE  PAINTERS        105 

was  largely  classic  :  he  was  an  ardent  aud  devoted 
admirer  of  Titian,  the  Poussins,  Wilson,  and  his 
highest  enthusiasm  was  for  Claude.      '  IIow  en- 
chanting/   he    writes    (of    the    Narcissus),    'and 
lovely  it  is ;  far,  very  far   surpassing   any  other 
landscape  I  ever  beheld.'     He  was  then  at  Cole- 
Orton,  as  Sir  George's  guest :  he  had  gone  there 
to  copy  his  favourite  painter,  and  he  worked  so 
hard  as  to  impair  his  health.      '  I  do  not  wonder,' 
he  cries  to  his  wife,  in  a  rapture  that  makes  him 
careless   of  grammar,   'at  your   being  jealous   of 
Claude  ;  if  anything  could  come  between  our  love, 
it  is  him ' ;  and,  again,  a  few  lines  later,  he  bursts 
out  with  'the  Claudes,  the  Claudes,  the  Claudes, 
are  all,  all  I  can  think  of  here.'     This  (and  more 
to  the  same  purpose)  was  written  some  five-and- 
thirty  years  after  that  iirst  sight  of  the  Narcissus, 
which,   says    Leslie,    'he   always   regarded    as   an 
important  epoch  in  his  life.'     It  is  fair  to  add  that, 
with  Sir  George's  Claudes,  he  saw  Sir  George's 
Girtins,  a  set  of  thirty  water-colours,    which   he 
was  advised  to  study  as  '  examples  of  great  breadth 
and  truth,'  and    whose    influence,   Leslie   thinks, 
'  may  be  more   or  less  traced  through  the  whole 
course  of  his  practice. '     Nothing  like  this  can  be 
said  of  the  Claudes.     Unlike  Turner,  whose  en- 
thusiasm was  nothing  if  not  imitative.  Constable 
remained  himself,  and  to  achieve  the  marriage  of 
the  new  art  with  the  old  was  reserved  for  one  later 
and  greater. 


106  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

His  first  visit  to  London  was  in  1795.  He 
had  a  letter  of  introduction  to  Farrington  (1747- 
1821),  who  looked  at  his  work,  predicted  his 
greatness,  and  told  him  what  he  knew  of  the  prac- 
tice of  his  own  master,  Richard  Wilson ;  and  he 
made  the  acquaintance  of  '  Antiquity  Smith  '  (1766- 
1838),  the  author,  antiquary,  draughtsman,  and 
engraver,  from  whom  he  received  much  valuable 
counsel  and  encouragement.  The  next  year  he 
was  settled  again  at  Bergholt,  reading  Algarotti 
and  Leonardo  and  Gessner,  copying  'Tempesta's 
large  battle,'  painting  A  Chymist  and  An  Al- 
chymist  —  'for  which  I  am  chiefly  indebted  to 
our  immortal  bard ' — drawing  cottages  for  Smith 
to  engrave,  making  flying  visits  to  London, 
working  between-whiles  in  his  father's  counting- 
house;  and  in  the  February  of  179'?  he  was 
admitted  a  student  of  the  Royal  Academy,  and, 
says  Leslie,  'had  resumed  his  pencil  not  to  lay  it 
aside.'  After  that  you  find  him  making  elaborate 
studies  from  the  living  model  and  from  anatomical 
sections ;  copying  Wilson,  Ruysdael,  Carracci,  and 
Claude ;  sketching  at  Ipswich — where  '  I  fancy  I 
see  Gainsborough  in  every  hedge  and  hollow  tree ' — 
in  Derbyshire,  and  'among  the  oaks  and  solitudes 
of  Helmiugham  Park ' ;  and  painting,  in  utter 
scorn  of  the  'cold  trumpery  stuff"  he  saw  being 
done  about  him,  to  please  himself,  until  in  1802  he 
broke  ground,  with  a  Landscape  at  the  Royal 
Academy.      The  most  useful   of  his  friends  was 


SOME  LANDSCAPE  PAINTERS        107 

Benjamin  VV^est  (l7'38-1820)j  who  encourajred  him 
generously  and  well ;  persuaded  liim  to  refuse  a 
drawing-master's  place^  which  Dr.  Fisher  (after- 
wards Bishop  of  Salisbury)  had  offered  him^  and 
depend  entirely  upon  himself;  and  gave  him  a 
great  deal  of  excellent  advice,  some  of  which — as, 
for  example,  the  hint  to  remember  that  '  light  and 
shadow  never  stand  still' — he  adopted,  and  some 
of  which — as,  for  example,  the  precept  that  '  what- 
ever object  he  was  painting,'  he  should  '  keep  in 
mind  its  prevailing  character  rather  than  its  acci- 
dental appearance' — he  forgot  more  frequently 
than  was  good  for  him.  For  the  rest,  he  had  con- 
vinced himself  that  there  was  '  room  enough  for  a 
natural  paiuter'  (the  italics  are  his  own),  had 
decided  that  '  truth  only  will  last,  and  can  only 
have  just  claims  on  posterity,'  and  had  determined 
to  cease  from  '  running  after  pictures  and  seeking 
the  truth  at  second  hand ' ;  so  that  he  had  fairly 
begun  his  course,  and  shaped  his  destiny. 

Both  were  uneventful  enough.  He  sailed  to 
Deal  in  an  East-Indiaman,  and  used  the  experience 
in  a  picture  (1806)  of  H.M.S.  'Victory'  in  the 
Battle  of  Trafalgar;  he  went  sketching  in  the 
Lake  District,  and  turned  the  results  to  some 
account  in  the  exhibitions,  but  found  that  the 
solitude  of  mountains  depressed  his  spirits ;  he 
painted  some  portraits,  a  couple  of  altar-pieces  for 
Brantham  and  Nayland  C'hurches,  a  great  number 
of  copies  (chiefly   Sir   Joshuas)   for  the   Earl   of 


108  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

Dysart;  he  married^  after  years  and  years  of  pro- 
bation, and  was  quietly  happy  in  his  wife  and 
children ;  he  exhibited  constantly  and  to  such 
purpose  that  in  1822 — when  he  had  been  three 
years  an  Associate,  and  was  known  as  the  painter 
of  The  White  Horse  (1819),  the  Stratford  Mill 
(1820),  and  The  Hay  Wain  (1821),  to  name  but 
these — he  is  found  asking  his  friend  Archdeacon 
Fisher  for  the  loan  of  £20  or  £80.  His  prices 
were  small  enough,  for  he  was  glad  to  take  £100 
apiece  for  The  White  Horse  and  the  Stratford 
Mill,  which  were  both  six-foot  canvases,  the  first 
he  ever  painted ;  for  his  famous  and  excellent 
Boat  passing  a  Lock  (1824)  he  got  but  a  hundred 
and  fifty  guineas  '  including  the  frame ' ;  and  he 
was  content,  after  some  haggling,  to  sell  The  Hay 
Wain  and  A  Lock  on  the  Stour  for  £250  the 
pair,  and  to  give  the  purchaser,  a  Frenchman, 
'a  small  picture  of  Yarmouth  into  the  bargain.' 
This  was  the  most  profitable  sale  he  ever  made. 
For  the  purchaser  exhibited  his  purchase  at  the 
memorable  Salon  of  1824  ;  and  Constable  awoke 
to  find  himself  the  most  famous  Englishman  in 
all  the  history  of  French  art.  ^ 

1  For  the  results  of  his  appearance  see  ante,  pp.  36-39. 
This  was  his  highest  moment,  and,  so  far  as  I  know,  he 
did  not  profit  Ijj-  it  in  England.  He  died,  indeed,  in  1837, 
and  Ruskin,  bent  on  winning  the  world  for  Turner,  ran 
amok  at  Constable,  as  he  had  run  amok  at  Claude.  The 
effect  of  his  unscrupulous,  adroit,  and  most  ingenious 
ecstasy  was  that  we  had  to  suffer  Rossetti,  and  to  read  our 


SOME  LANDSCAPE  PAINTERS        109 

IV 

The  year  after  Cotman's  death,  his  effects  were 
sold  at  Christie's :  most  of  his  drawings  went  for 
a  few  shillings   apiece,   and  the  top 
prices   of  a    two-days'    sale  —  which 
produced    the     beggarly     total      of  '^  ^ '  ''^ 

£262,  14s.— were  £6,  and  £8,  16s.  Since  then 
times  and  tastes  have  changed ;  and  Cotman  has 
long  been  recognised,  as  his  biographer  remarks, 
for  'one  of  the  most  original  and  versatile  artists 
of  the  first  half  of  this  century,'  a  draughts- 
man and  colourist  of  exceptional  gifts,  a  water- 
colourist  worthy  to  be  ranked  among  the  greater 
men,  and  excellent  whether  as  a  painter  of  land 
or  sea.  Indeed,  he  was  a  rarely  endowed  and, 
whatever  his  medium,  completely  accomplished 
artist.  In  etching,  for  example,  he  drew  his 
inspiration    from,   the    overpowering    achievement 

Constable,  as  the  rest  of  the  world  had  read  him,  in  a 
French  translation.  Now  Ruskin  is  gone  :  '  The  sweet 
war-man  is  dead  and  rotten ' :  and  one  can  admire  as  one 
will,  so  that  even  Mr.  Whistler  is  somebody,  and  a 
Nicholson  (say)  is  not  to  be  put  out  of  court  because  it  ia 
not  like  something  else— a  Fra  Angelico,  for  instance, 
or  a  Carpaccio,  or  a  Tintoret.  On  the  whole,  we  have 
had  our  fill  (and  more  than  our  fill)  of  Modern  Painters. 
'Twas  an  irresistible  book  in  its  time.  But  Turner  is 
pretty  much  where  he  would  have  been  had  it  never  been 
written.  So,  too,  are  Constable  and  the  others — the  un- 
worthy, the  obscene,  the  jugulated — Van  Dyck,  and 
Rembrandt,  and  Caspar  Poussin;  and  that  is,  or  should 
be,  enough.     [1901,] 


110  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

of  Gianbattista  Piranesi,  and  if  he  had  nothing  of 
the  grandiose  imagination  and  the  sense  of  mystery 
and  romance  which  give  to  that  master  a  place 
apart  among  those  who  have  treated  the  results  of 
architecture  as  material  for  art,  he  is  also  found  to 
be  lacking  in  the  trick  of  emphasis,  the  tendency 
to  exaggerate,  disfeature,  and  misreport,  by  which 
the  Venetian's  work  is  often  vitiated,  and  which 
make  him  so  redoubtable  a  model.  It  is  the  same 
with  him  in  water-colours  and  in  oils.  His  master- 
quality  is  a  capacity  for  simplification  and  selec- 
tion. It  was  a  maxim  with  him  to  '  leave  out,  but 
add  nothing,'  and  he  practised  his  theory  with  an 
assurance  of  hand  and  an  intelligence  of  eye  that 
stamp  him,  in  this  respect  at  least,  a  true  and 
excellent  artist.  No  doubt  he  would  have  done 
better  had  he  attempted  less  and  laboured  in  fewer 
fields  ;  but,  even  so,  his  best  work  is  lifted  into 
greatness  by  the  presence  of  a  manly  and  sincere 
imagination  tempered  with  style. 


Cox  was  a  patient  and  faithful  student  of  Nature, 
and    particularly    of    certain    essential    facts    in 

Nature  :   as  the  action  of  light,  the 

DAVID  COX         a     >.       c       •    A         a  a  4. 

eiiect   of  wind   and    rain    and    mist,      / 

the  shape  and  the  motion  of  clouds,  •/ 

the  variable  and  aifecting  quality  of  atmosphere ; 

and  the  best  of  his  achievement — simple,  direct. 


SOME  LANDSCAPE  PAINTERS        111 

sincere — is  an  individua,  reflection  of  much  that 
but  for  him  might  have  gone  unrecorded.  As 
it  seems  to  some,  he  is  least  attractive  and  con- 
vincing when  he  is  most  elaborate ;  for  then  his 
work  is  apt  to  set  forth  far  too  much  of  his  personal 
idiosyncrasy  (on  the  whole  'tis  tame  and  common- 
place), and  to  be  greatly  wanting  in  the  freshness 
and  spontaneity  of  his  transcripts  from  the  living 
fact.  Naturally,  his  admirers  are  numerous  and 
ardent,  and  to  those  not  with  them  his  reputation 
appears  exaggerated. 


VI 

He  was  not  original  nor  powerful  ;  but  he  was 
always  '  Grecian  Williams '  and  an  exponent  of  the 
classic  convention  in  landscape.  This 
is  to  say  that  he  composed  with  WILLIAMS 
elegance,  drew  with  correctness,  and 
was  judicious  in  selection,  tranquil  in  sentiment, 
and  graceful  in  effect.  His  taste  was  in  every 
sense  refined  ;  his  colour  has  but  to  be  unaltered 
to  be  pleasing ;  his  work,  though  its  interest  is 
largely  archaeological,  is  always  reminiscent  of  style. 
He  reminds  one  of  a  writer  of  sonnets  with  nothing 
particular  to  say  and  with  a  fine  understanding  of 
how  things  may  and  should  be  said.  It  is  well 
for  him  and  his  like  in  art  to  be  suckled  in  a 
creed  outworn,  and   ill    to  be   born  into   a   faith 


112  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

whose  dogmas  are  not  yet  disengaged,  and  whose 
very  formulas  are  still  to  find.  Posterity  is  in- 
terested in  the  experiments  of  none  but  the 
very  greatest :  as  Rubens,  Titian,  Velasquez, 
Rembrandt  van  Ryn.  What  it  demands  of  the 
others  is,  not  the  proof  that  they  concerned  them- 
selves with  the  solution  of  problems,  which  they 
had  not  begun  to  comprehend,  but,  the  proof 
that  they  understood  and  attempted  a  certain 
established  and  consummate  mode.  Grecian 
Williams,  with  all  those  who  are  faithful  to  a  con- 
vention, remains  respectable  in  despite  of  change ; 
and  that  is  the  reason  why. 


VII 

The  De  Wints  were  Dutch  and  Dutch- Americans ; 

but  a  branch  of  them  crossed  the  Atlantic  to  settle 

in  England,  and  Peter  De  Wint  was 

born    at     Stone,      in     Staffordshire, 

where     his    father     practised    as    a 

physician.     In  1802  he  was  apprenticed  to  Raphael 

Smith,  the    engraver    and    portrait-painter,    with 

whom  he  remained  four  years.     In  1807  he  began  to 

exhibit ;  in  1809  he  entered  the  Royal  Academy 

Schools ;  in  1810  he  married  a  sister  of  William 

Hilton  (Hilton  married  a  sister  of  De  Wint),  and 

joined  the  Society  of  Painters  in  Water  Colours ; 

in  1812  he  became  a  member  of  the  same  Society ; 

he  had  many  friends  and  patrons,  was  a  popular 


SOME  LANDSCAPE  PAINTERS        113 

drawing-master,  painted  continually  in  the  open 
air,  exhibited  until  the  end,  got  little  for  his 
drawings,  and  died  (at  sixty-five)  of  heart  disease. 
That  is  all  there  is  to  tell. 

He  painted  excellently  in  oils,  and  it  is  beginning 
to  be  suspected  that  he  is,  perhaps,  the  chief  of 
English  water-colourists.  His  drawing  is  expres- 
sive and  sound,  his  colour  rich,  luminous,  and 
decorative  ;  his  brushwork  has  distinction  as  well 
as  vigour  and  facility  ;  largely  massed,  and  elegant 
in  line,  his  compositions  have  that  quality  of  com- 
pleteness which  is  one  of  the  signs  of  art  ;  his 
treatment  of  light  and  air  is  both  subtle  and 
broad ;  in  his  work  the  manliest  sincerity  and 
directness  are  found  in  union  with  an  even  delicacy 
of  insight  and  a  simple  magic  of  effect.  For- 
tunately for  us  all,  he  was  a  painter  pure  and 
simple,  from  whose  work  the  litei'ary  element  is 
absent,  whose  merits  are  merely  pictorial,  and 
with  whose  pre-eminency  (such  as  it  is)  the  rhapso- 
dist  has  nothing  to  do. 

vni 

Linnell's  reputation  was  at  one  time  overpower- 
ing, but  the  grounds  of  it  are  hard  to  distinguish. 
He  was,  no  doubt,  a  sturdy  student 
of  Nature ;  and  he  had,  no  doubt,  a 
strenuous  and  rugged  solemnity  of 
purpose,   of    which    his   work    was    a    sincere,   if 

H 


LINNELL 

1792-1882 


114  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

halting,  expression.  But  his  colour,  with  its  coarse 
purples  and  its  garish  reds  and  greens,  is  painfully 
hot  and  vicious  ;  his  mastery  of  paint  is  never 
conspicuous  save  in  absence  ;  his  handling,  for  all 
its  air  of  bravura,  is  niggled  and  small  enough 
to  be  oddly  at  variance  with  the  vague  of  his 
ambitions  and  the  passionate  melodrama  of  his 
ideas.  His  diligent  hand  was  altogether  at  odds 
with  his  labouring  brain,  and  it  is  doubtful  if  in 
the  range  of  British  art  there  is  any  achievement 
in  which  the  quality  of  paintiness  is  so  violently 
apparent  as  in  his.  A  typical  Linnell  is  enough 
to  show  that,  well  as  he  meant  and  vigorous  as 
was  his  temperament,  the  outcome  of  such  endow- 
ments as  his  is  ever  a  negation  of  art. 


IX 

In  1846  this  man's  pictorial  remains  were  sold 

by  auction,  and,  the  Public  having  awakened  to 

the  fact  that  he  had  been  one  of  the 

foremost   landscape    painters   of  the 
1S12-1845  .  ,  .  .  1         , 

tmie,    his    executors    cleared    some 

£4600  by  the  sale.  All  the  same,  it  is  like  enough 
that  he  had  not  attained  to  anything  like  his 
highest ;  and  it  is  certain  that  he  was  largely 
gifted  and  finely  accomplished.  lie  painted  and 
drew  with  equal  vigour  and  facility,  and,  as  his 
faculty  of  composition  was  both  well-bred  and  well- 
trained,   and    his   pictorial   invention    of  singular 


SOME  LANDSCAPE  PAINTERS        115 

readiness  and  fertility,  he  produced  as  much  in 
the  few  years  that  it  was  given  him  to  live  as 
many  men  of  twice  his  age.  At  his  best  his  colour 
is  full,  rich,  personal,  alive  ;  his  pictorial  quality 
is  excellent  in  kind  and  overpowering  in  degree  ; 
he  produces  an  effect  of  strength  and  of  complete- 
ness— of  personality  in  union  with  style — which 
few  Englishmen  have  had  in  them  to  surpass. 


The  best  of  Bough  was  Bough  himself;  and  of 
the  humour,  the  temperament,  the  independence 

of  mind,  the  buxom  and  jovial  sin- 

^.      4.1,  *  4.   4.  1       4.1    4.  SAM  BOUGH 

cerity   that  went  to  make  that    up, 

,  .  ,     .     ,  .  ,  1822-1878 

there  is  not  too  much  in  his  work. 

His    chief    oil    pictures    are    the    Cadzow    Forest 

scenes,   the   Dumbarton,   the  Baggage    Waggons  (a 

reminiscence    of    Miiller),    the    Rocket   Cart,   the 

St.   Monance,  the  Borrowdale ,  the  Edinburgh,  the 

Holy  Island,    the    Mail    Coach    entering    Carlisle, 

the    Kirkwall    Harbour,    and    the    London  from 

Shooter's  Hill.     They  are  big,  bold,  '  scenic  '  work, 

and,   at   least    as    effects    in    pictorial   histrionics 

— for  Bough  was  nothing  if  not  '  theatrical ' — their 

interest  is  considerable.     It  is  on  his  water-colours, 

however,   that   his    renown    is    stablished.      They 

have   a  tenderness    and   a  fulness   of  expression 

which  he  never  compassed  in  the  other  medium. 


116  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

His  skies  are  very  often  good,  and  in  his  render- 
ings of  wind  and  motion  he  captured  and  paraded 
not  a  little  of  the  feeling  and  the  energy  of 
several  greater  men.  Again,  he  was  eminently 
versatile  :  all  aspects  of  Nature  were  familiar  to 
him  ;  marine,  or  pastoral,  or  sylvan,  he  had  an  eye 
for  whatever  would  paint,  and,  in  water-colour 
at  least,  a  real  gusto  of  expression.  His  work 
abounds  in  commonplaces ;  he  was  too  often 
enamoured  of  the  superficial.  But,  on  the  whole, 
his  art  is  vigorous,  healthy,  frequently  agreeable, 
and  sometimes  better  than  any  but  the  best. 


XI 

Whethek  Lawson  had  or  had  not  said  his  last 
word   remains  uncertain.       What  is  not  doubtful 
CECIL  is  that  he  was  a  born  painter,  with  a 

LAWSON  vigorous  and  sterling  gift  of  expres- 

1851-1882  sion.    Within  the  limits  of  an  intense, 

if  rather  narrow,  scheme  of  green  and  blue  he  was 
a  true,  though  not  a  distinguished,  colourist ;  and 
his  best  work  is  marked  by  breadth  of  vision  and 
largeness  of  treatment,  and  therewith  a  real  sense 
of  style.  His  inspiration  was  frankly  Flemish  :  he 
was  a  pupil  of  Rubens,  and  the  convention  to 
which  he  chose  to  adapt  his  ideas  was  chiefly 
modelled  on  his  master's.  It  follows  that  his 
painting,  whatever  its  defects,  and  however  near 


SOME  LANDSCAPE  PAINTERS        117 

it  be  to  failure^  is  always  positively  artistic,  and 
that  his  relations  with  Nature  are  characterised 
by  a  certain  reticence  and  good  breeding. 
Facts  are  never  the  end  with  him — they  are  only 
the  means :  he  refrains  from  the  vulgarity  of 
realisation,  and  essays  no  more  than  the  pictorial 
expression  of  certain  balanced  and  choice  sugges- 
tions. His  handling  is  often  not  less  solid  than 
dexterous;  in  his  victories,  as  in  his  defeats,  he 
remains  a  painter.  It  is  possible  that,  had  he 
lived,  he  would  have  made  his  convention  popular 
and  intelligible,  and  founded  a  school  with  higher 
aims  than  experiment  and  a  better  ambition  than 
that  of  being  merely  representative. 


XII 

He  is  described  as  an  '^  amateur,'  and  in  a  sense 
the  description  is  descriptive  enough ;  but  amateurs 
of   Thomson's   stamp    are   as    rare        THOMSON 
as  great  artists,  from  which,  when     qf  DUDDING- 
they     are     found,     they     are     not  STON 

easily     distinguished.        Thomson,  1778-1840 

indeed,  is  comparatively  the  greatest  Scots  land- 
scape-painter. What  is  more,  his  place  in  British 
art  is  eminent  as  well  as  peculiar.  His  technical 
practice  could  be  faulty  on  occasion,  but  at  its 
best  it  is  sound  in  method  and  brilliant  in  effect. 
His  colour  is  often  of  remarkable  significance  and 


118  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

beauty.  His  pictorial  faculty  was  so  sane  in  kind 
and  so  vigorous  in  quality  as  to  be  almost  infallible  : 
it  was  as  a  painter  that  he  looked  at  fact ;  it  was  as 
a  painter  that  he  received,  selected,  and  arranged 
his  impressions  ;  it  was  as  a  painter  that  he  formu- 
lated his  conclusions,  recorded  his  results,  and 
produced  his  effects.  For  not  only  was  he  a 
devout  and  ardent  student  of  Nature  :  he  was 
also  an  innamorate  of  art,  and  especially  of  art 
as  understood  and  practised  by  the  great  men  of 
the  great  landscape  school  of  Rome.  It  is  told 
of  him  that  he  was  an  immense  admirer  of 
Turner,  but  I  do  not  think  it  easy  to  gather 
that  much  from  his  works.  Before  the  English- 
man's ambitions  and  effects,  however  dazzling 
they  may  have  seemed  to  him  and  however  closely 
he  may  have  cherished  them,  he  preferred  the 
ideals  and  the  achievements  of  the  Poussins  and 
of  Claude.  And  the  fact  remains  that  his  best, 
while  profoundly  romantic  in  temper,  is  large  in 
treatment  and  dignified  in  aim,  and  is  touched 
throughout  with  the  supreme  distinction  of  style  : 
is,  in  truth,  a  lasting  demonstration  of  the  uses  of 
convention  and  an  eloquent  reproof  to  them  that 
asseverate  that  art  is  individual  or  is  nothing. 


FOUR   PORTRAIT  PAINTERS 


Sir  Joshua  painted  men  and  women  and  children 
with  equal  distinction,  understanding,  and  effect ; 

and  he  remains  the  completest  artist, 

1  I,  4.1,  u.     4.         •    4.  REYNOLDS 

and    perhaps    the    greatest    paniter, 

T-T  1723-1792 

that  Britain  has  yet  produced.  No 
doubt  there  have  been  men  whose  intelligence 
was  more  curious  and  more  apprehensive  ;  and  it 
may  be  there  are  some  who  have  done  brush-work 
as  close  to  fact  and  as  eloquent  according  to  the 
conditions  and  the  rules  of  paint.  But  none, 
whether  in  portraiture  or  landscape,  has  maintained 
so  lofty  and  so  imperturbable  a  level  of  excellence, 
or  shown  so  constant  and  so  exquisite  a  respect  for 
dignity  of  style.  It  is  the  fashion  to  talk  of 
Turner  as  of  one  divinely  inspired,  of  Gainsborough 
as  being  magnetic,  infallible,  irresistible,  of  others 
to  similar  purpose,  each  after  his  kind  ;  and 
in  a  sense  the  fashion  is  right.  We  English 
have  always  regarded  art  as  nothing  if  not  per- 
sonal^ and  have  valued  our  artists  not  according 

119 


120  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

to  their  places  in  the  hierarchy  of  painty  but  accord- 
ing as  we  found  them  interesting,  mysterious, 
engaging'',  and  the  like  ;  and  the  result  has  been 
that,  even  as  we  have  devoured,  with  an  appe- 
tite for  whose  intrepidity  no  praise  can  be  too 
great,  such  crude  imaginings  and  half-phrased 
ideas  as  the  work  of  Blake  and  Rossetti  (to  name 
but  these),  we  have  contrived  by  the  operation  of 
a  peculiar  mental  process — an  effect  partly  of 
culture  and  partly  of  native  worth — to  get  our- 
selves into  such  a  condition  of  taste  as  makes  the 
denial  of  Sir  Joshua's  pre-eminency  rather  meri- 
torious than  not.  But  it  is  not  Sir  Joshua  who 
suflFers :  it  is  ourselves.  He  was,  it  is  true,  above 
all  things  the  exponent  of  a  mere  convention  ; 
and  before  that  the  English  mind — fed  full  of  the 
immense  suggestiveness  of  Turner,  and  made 
drunken  with  the  nepenthe  of  Turner's  chief 
prophet — is  only  too  apt  to  prefer  such  strange 
gods  as  mystery,  romance,  individuality,  and 
the  rest  of  them.  But  it  is  none  the  less  true 
that  Sir  Joshua,  whatever  his  place  in  the  art  of 
Britain,  is  a  far  more  brilliant  and  conspicuous 
figure  in  the  art  of  the  world  than  any  English- 
man before  or  since  his  time.  It  is  a  commonplace 
that  he  had  design,  colour,  the  capacity  of  brush- 
work,  the  pictorial  sense,  the  genius  of  character- 
isation, the  perfection  of  good  breeding,  the  charm 
of  a  distinguished  style,  and  therewith  the  touch 
that  brings  such  artists  as  Thackeray  to  his  feet 


FOUR  PORTRAIT  PAINTERS  121 

and  constrains  such  sturdy,  hobnailed  Muses  as 
Wordsworth's  to  take  up  their  testimony  against 
him.  It  is  a  commonplace,  too,  that  he  was  some- 
times mannered,  and  on  occasion  could  be  feeble  ; 
that  he  carried  his  interest  in  his  material  to  a 
point  at  which  he  wilfully  sacrificed  the  future  to 
the  present,  and  expressed  himself  in  terms  which 
he  probably  knew  would  not  endure  the  touch  of 
time ;  that  he  was  '  courtly,'  prone  to  please, 
addicted  to  flattery,  very  conscious  of  the  merits 
of  Sir  Joshua  Reynolds.  What  is  of  vital  import- 
ance is  that  he  was  so  complete  a  master  of  a 
certain  noble,  and  withal  a  most  imperious,  con- 
vention that  he  challenges  comparison  to  those 
whose  invention  and  achievement  it  was,  and  whose 
merit  it  remains,  to  have  expressed  themselves  to 
immortal  purpose  within  its  limits  and  in  obedi- 
ence to  its  rules.  The  pedants  pass — they  and 
their  catalogues  with  them  ;  the  literary  critic  of 
art  dies  of  his  own  literature ;  the  fashions,  the 
airs  and  graces,  of  inspiration  change,  flourish, 
and  are  forgotten  almost  with  the  hour.  But  for 
Sir  Joshua  there  is  no  vanishing,  nor  death,  nor 
change.  He  had  the  supreme  good  sense  to 
recognise  that  Raphael,  Titian,  Van  Dyck  were 
his  masters,  and  that  as  their  pupil  he  was  greater 
than  everybody  save  themselves. 


122  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

II 

Gainsborough  is  as  brilliant  and  fascinating  a 
personality  as  exists  in  English  art.     He  was  the 

GAINS-  kindest^   the   waywardest,    the   most 

BOROUGH         passionate  of  men  :  '  a  natural  gentle- 

1727-1788  man,'  says  Northcote  ;    a  fanatic  of 

music  and  a  romantic  lover  of  musical  instru- 
ments ;  curious  of  novelty,  greedy  of  experience  ; 
with  more  interests  than  he  could  manage,  more 
ambitions  than  he  could  gratify,  more  tempera- 
ment than  he  could  adequately  express.  His 
achievement,  alike  in  portraiture  and  landscape, 
is  large,  and  the  quality  of  much  is  very  good. 
But  it  includes  some  elements  of  imperfectness 
which  are  as  the  seeds  of  death.  His  training 
was  incomplete ;  his  accomplishment  was  never 
consummate ;  his  colour,  for  all  its  charm,  is 
thin — is  as  of  Watteau  without  richness  and  with- 
out lambency  and  glow  ;  his  brush  work,  for  all 
its  ease  and  spontaneity  and  suggestiveness,  too 
often  produces  an  impression  which  maybe  likened 
to  the  effect  of  painted  china ;  his  work  is  too 
frequently  experimental  or  capricious.  There  is 
in  him  something  of  the  amateur ;  and  it  is  impos- 
sible not  to  feel  that  his  art  is  not  fully  repre- 
sentative of  his  admirable  native  gift.  He  had  a 
rare  facility  of  hand  ;  he  was  inventive,  ingenious, 
even  imaginative,  and  he  was  so  in  his  own  way, 
with    a    mixture    of   sincerity   and    grace   that    is 


FOUR  PORTRAIT  PAINTERS  123 

very  winning  ;  in  landscape  he  touched  at  times  a 
note  of  natural  and  peculiar  romance.  But  it  is 
vain  to  deny  that  his  possibilities  were  greater 
than  his  performance,  and  that  to  equal  him  with 
so  great  a  master  of  style  as  Reynolds  is  to  ignore 
the  very  essentials  of  art. 


Ill 

The  dominant   in    Romney's   life   is   a  note   of 
sexual  tragedy.     The  worship  in  paint  which  he 
professed   for   Emma   Lyon   is   com- 
parable of  its  kind  and  in  its  degree 

1734-1802 
to   that   which  Dante   practised    for 

Beatrice  in  poetry.  That  he  was  not  materially 
her  lover  is  suggested  by  the  fact  that  he  never 
tired  of  painting  her.  The  triumphing  male 
does  not  commonly  disperse  his  energies  in  cele- 
brating the  peculiarities  of  his  conquest.  There 
have  been  examples  to  the  contrary,  of  course  ; 
but  good  taste,  good  feeling,  the  instinct  of  sex, 
the  necessities  of  art,  are  generally  on  the  other 
side,  and  for  one  such  outcry  of  full-fed  satisfaction 
as  (say)  Kossetti's  Nuptial  Sleep  (which  may  or 
may  not  be  genuine),  there  are  a  thousand  such 
voicings  of  mere  desire  as  (say)  Adelaide  and 
Romney's  '  Lady  Hamilton '  passim.  In  any  case 
Romney's  place  in  British  art  is  not  with  the 
highest.     He  had  grace,  invention,  facility ;  above 


124  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

all,  he  had,  and  still  has,  charm  ;  but  if  he  were 
a  type  of  the  artistic  temperament,  there  is 
scarce  any  sense  in  which  he  can  be  said  to 
have  been  an  ai'tist,  and  even  at  its  best  his 
work  is  found  to  be  more  or  less  of  an  d  peu 
pres — a  something  which  is  only  almost  done,  and 
to  be  enjoyed  must  be  approached  and  considered 
with  certain  touches  of  the  child's  humour  of 
makebelieve.  In  portraiture  he  is  sometimes 
very  nearly  good  ;  as  a  dabbler  in  pictorial 
romance  he  was  responsible  for  many  attempts  at 
doing  something  not  then  to  be  done.  But  he  was 
— as  Nelson  was— a  man  with  a  passion,  and  his 
condition  remains  the  more  fortunate.  The  nation 
greatly  honoured  the  hero  who  did  its  work  at 
the  Nile  and  Copenhagen  and  Trafalgar.  And 
it  seems  to  have  decided  to  regard  in  something 
of  the  same  spirit  the  man  who,  dimly  seeing  and 
imperfectly  showing  the  existence  of  new  possibili- 
ties in  art,  yet  painted  one  vvoman  in  such  a  way 
that  he  chiefly  lives  as  that  one  woman's  painter. 


IV 

The    material    Raeburn    found    in    his    native 

place  was   of  the   finest    quality.      The  blessing 

of    the    Union   was    everywhere    ap- 

RAEBURN         parent,   but    Scotland    was   not   yet 

175  -I  23  Anglicized,  and  Edinburgh  was  still 

her  capital  in  fact  as  well  as  in  name.     As  the 


FOUR  PORTRAIT  PAINTERS  125 

city  at  once  of  Walter  Scott  and  of  the  Great 
Unknown^  it  was  a  metropolis  of  poetry  and 
fiction  ;  as  the  city  of  Jeffrey  and  Maga,  it  was  a 
centre  of  so-called  criticism  ;  as  the  city  of  Raeburn 
and  John  Thomson,  it  was  a  high  place  of  por- 
traiture and  landscape ;  as  the  city  of  Archibald 
Constable  and  the  Ballantynes,  it  was  a  head- 
quarters of  bookselling  and  printing.  It  was  the 
city  of  Reid  and  Dugald  Stewart,  of  Erskine  and 
Henry  Dundas,  of  John  Home  and  Henry  Mac- 
kenzie, of  Braxiield  and  Newton  and  Clerk  of  Eldin, 
of  Francis  Horner  and  Neil  Gow  ;  and  as  Raeburn 
painted  the  most  of  these — and  indeed  there  was 
scarce  an  eminent  Scotsman  but  sat  to  him — 
his  achievement  may  be  said  to  mirror  some  thirty 
years  of  the  Scots  nation  s  life.  Scarce  anywhere 
could  he  have  found  better  models ;  which,  for 
their  part,  were  thrice  fortunate  in  their  painter. 
Honourable  as  were  his  beginnings,  they  scarce 
gave  earnest  of  the  results  of  his  later  years.  His 
genius,  essentially  symmetrical  and  sane,  did  but 
mature  with  time ;  artistic  from  the  first,  his 
accomplishment  was  finest  at  his  death  ;  his  vision 
was  at  its  keenest  in  his  latest  efforts  ;  his  life,  in 
fine,  was  a  piece  of  work  as  sound  and  healthy 
and  manly  as  his  art.  Thus  :  '  he  is  said  to  have 
lost  a  great  deal  of  money  by  becoming  security 
for  a  relative,  but  he  bore  his  loss  with  great  com- 
posure, and  painted  no  more  industriously  after 
than    before';    he  spent  much    of  his  leisure  in 


126  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

'  mechanics  and  natural  philosophy ' ;  he  practised 
sculpture — it  is  said  that  when  he  was  study- 
ing under  Michelangelo  in  Rome,  he  came  near 
to  preferring  it  before  painting — with  a  certain 
diligence ;  he  '  excelled,'  says  his  biographer  '  at 
archery,  golf,  and  other  Scottish  exercises ' ;  he 
laid  out  and  built  ^on  so  judicious  and  tasteful  a 
plan '  that  his  estate  became  in  no  great  while 
'the  most  extensive  suburb  attached  to  Edin- 
burgh ' ;  he  was  an  excellent  talker ;  he  appears 
to  have  been  singularly  fortunate  in  his  domestic 
relations ;  he  enjoyed  the  friendship  as  he  com- 
manded the  admiration  of  the  most  distinguished 
men  of  his  time  ;  his  health  was  perfect ;  he  stood 
upwards  of  six  feet  two  in  his  boots  ;  '  it  may  be 
added  that,  while  engaged  in  painting,  his  step 
and  attitudes  were  at  once  stately  and  graceful.' 
His  character  and  his  career,  indeed,  have  all  the 
balance,  the  unity,  the  symmetrical  completeness, 
of  his  genius  and  his  achievement ;  and  the 
rhythm  to  which  they  moved — large,  dignified, 
consummate :  like  that  of  a  Handelian  chorus — 
remained  unbroken  until  the  end.  It  came  in 
1823.  He  was  now  a  man  of  sixty-seven ;  his 
health  was  apparently  imperturbable  ;  with  Scott 
and  Adam  and  Shepherd,  he  had  been  for  some 
years  in  the  habit  of  '  interposing  a  parenthesis 
into  the  chapter  of  public  business  for  the  purpose 
of  visiting  objects  of  historical  interest  and  curi- 
osity' ;  and   this   year  he  had  not  only  'visited 


FOUR  PORTRAIT  PAINTERS  127 

with  enthusiasm  the  ancient  ruins  of  St.  Andrews, 
of  Pittenweem,  and  other  remains  of  antiquity,' 
but  had  also  '  contributed  much  to  the  hilarity  of 
the  party,'  Returning  to  Edinburgh,  he  had  been 
honoured  with  a  sitting  from  Sir  Walter,  of  whom 
he  was  anxious  to  finish  two  presentments,  one  for 
himself  and  one  for  Lord  Montagu  ;  and  '  within 
a  day  or  two  afterwards '  he  was  '  suddenly  affected 
with  a  general  decay  and  debility,' — a  condition 
' not  accompanied  by  any  visible  complaint.'  He 
lingered  no  more  than  a  week;  and  so  it  befell 
that  the  portrait  of  the  author  of  Waverley  was 
the  last  to  make  any  call  upon  a  capacity  of 
brain  and  hand  unetiualled  in  that  owner's  day. 
Thus  does  Scotland  work  :  she  has  the  genius  of 
fitness,  so  that  to  the  world  without  her  acliieve- 
ment  seems  ever  instinct  with  the  very  spirit  of 
romance.  There  are  two  great  artists  in  the 
Edinburgh  of  1823,  and  the  one  dies  painting  the 
other  (the  fact  remains  'a  subject  of  affectionate 
regret '  to  the  survivor).  I  think  of  Hugo — of  the 
Je  crois  en  Dieu  of  his  last  will  and  testament, 
his  careful  provision  of  a  pauper's  hearse.  And 
I  revert  with  pride  and  gratitude  to  the  supreme 
experience  of  this  august  pair  of  friends. 

There  is  often  virtue  in  a  nickname ;  and  much 
as  Jameson  is  still  renowned  as  the  Scottish 
Van  Dyck,  even  so,  but  with  greater  propriety, 
might  Raeburn — who  used  neither  compasses  nor 
chalks,  dealt  with  his  sitters  directly  through  the 


128  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

medium  of  paint,  and  was  identified  with  the  use 
of  tlie  ^  square '  touch  at  least  a  couple  of  genera- 
tions before  its  present  apotheosis — be  distinguished 
as  the  Scots  Velasquez.  It  is  told  that  when 
Wilkie  was  painting  in  the  Museo  del  Prado,  he 
had  but  to  consider  the  work  of  the  Spaniard  to  be 
'  always  reminded '  of  the  Scot's ;  and  it  is  a  fact 
that  the  one  has  at  least  some  tincture  of  the 
breadth  of  manner,  the  unity  of  effect,  the  quick, 
inevitable  touch,  the  notable  capacity  for  pre- 
ferring essentials — something,  too,  of  the  turn  for 
perfect  prose  as  opposed  to  high  romantic  poetry 
— which  are  present  to  so  marvellous  a  purpose 
in  the  other.  But  these  comparisons  of  less  to 
greater  are  misleading  ;  and  it  were  well  to  push 
the  parallel  no  further.  The  interest  of  art  is 
absolutely  incompatible  with  the  sentiment  of 
patriotism  ;  and  it  is  enough  to  know  that  Rae- 
burn,  whatever  his  degree  of  kinship  to  the 
king  of  painters,  was  an  excellent  and  dis- 
tinguished artist  in  paint.  He  came  at  the 
break  between  old  and  new — when  the  old  was 
not  yet  discredited,  and  the  new  was  still  in- 
offensive ;  and  with  tliat  exquisite  good  sense 
which  marks  the  artist,  he  identified  himself  with 
that  which  was  known,  and  not  with  that  which, 
though  big  witli  many  kinds  of  possibilities,  was 
as  yet  in  perfect  touch  with  nothing  actively 
alive.  His  draughtsmanship  was  good  enough 
when   he   chose;    his  colour    was    sound   enough 


FOUR  PORTRAIT  PAINTERS  129 

to  be  distinguished ;  sober  as  it  may  seem^  his 
feeling  for  paint  was  very  real ;  his  brush-work — 
intelligent^  vigorous,  expressive — was  that  of  a 
man  of  choice  and  forceful  temperament  trained 
in  the  ways  and  nourished  upon  the  conventions 
of  a  great  school.  And  with  all  this  he  was  Henry 
Raeburn — a  personality  so  shrewd  and  sensible, 
so  natural  and  healthy  and  sincere,  as  to  seem  not 
out  of  place  in  the  cycle  of  Walter  Scott.  He 
was  content  to  paint  that  he  knew,  and  that  only ; 
and  his  conscience  was  serviceable,  as  well  as 
untroubled  and  serene.  Of  the  mere  capacity  for 
poi'traiture — the  gift  of  perceiving  and  representing 
individual  character  and  form — he  had  more, 
perhaps,  than  any  portrait  painter  that  has  lived  ; 
and  not  a  little  of  his  merit  consists  in  that  he  was 
always  so  far  its  master  as  to  be  able  to  vocalise 
it  (as  it  were)  in  the  terms  of  paint,  so  that 
his  portraitures  are,  to  begin  with,  pictures. 
Here,  if  you  will,  are  facts ;  but  here,  unmistak- 
ably, is  paint,  is  accomplishment,  is  art.  And 
that  is  why  a  bad  Raeburn  is  better  than  the  best 
of  men  like  Shee  and  Grant.  That  is  why  a  good 
one  might  be  compared  without  much  suffering 
or  offence  to  a  good  Sir  Joshua  :  the  truth  being 
that  Sir  Henry  at  his  strongest  need  hardly  vail 
his  bonnet  to  the  best  that  have  painted  the  living 
aspects  of  men.  A  gentleman  is  company  for  the 
king.     [1890.] 


ARTISTS  AND   AMATEURS 


He  was  born  in  London,  where  at  four  he  is 
said  to  have  been  taught  in  West's  atelier,  while  at 

GEORGE         ^^^    ^^  ^^^    ^^    expert    in    certain 
MORLAND        branches  of  anatomy,  at  twelve  he 

1763-1804  could  model  ships,   and  at  eighteen 

he  taught  himself  the  fiddle.  Meanwhile  his 
father,  to  whom  he  had  been  bound  apprentice, 
had  put  him  through  a  course  of  discipline 
severe  enough  to  make  a  right  painter  of  him. 
He  was  long  imprisoned  with  a  series  of  casts 
from  the  antique,  and  when  he  had  mastered 
these,  he  was  turned  on  to  copy  pictures,  which 
Henry  Robert  Morland,  always  at  his  wits'  end 
for  money,  sold  as  fast  as  they  were  done,  to  the 
Jews.  George,  in  fact,  was  born  into  a  world  of 
thriftlessness  and  dishonourable  expediency,  and 
it  was  inevitable  that,  with  the  blood  and  the 
training  which  were  his,  he  should  have  turned 
out  the  rather  ruffianly  Bohemian  we  know. 

It  is  said  that  even  at  the  height  of  his  captivity 
he  used  to  cheat  his  father  and  make  money  for 

130 


ARTISTS  AND  AMATEURS  131 

himself:  that  lie  found  time  in  the  day  to  paint  a 
great  deal  of  stuff,  which  at  night  he  used  to  lower 
from    his   attic   window    into    the    street ;    there 
friendly  dealers  were  on  watch  for  it,  and  thence 
a  parcel  of  money  returned  to  him  at  the  end  of 
the  line  which  had  taken  his  panel  out  into  the 
world.      Be  this   as   it   may,   the    end   of  his  ap- 
prenticeship found  him  sick  and  tired  of  seclusion 
and  hard  labour  and  dependence ;  and,  refusing 
an  offer  from  Romney  of  a  three  years'  engage- 
ment at    £300  a  year,  he   went   to   live   with   a 
picture-dealer.     Of  course  he  took  to  seeing  life, 
and  to  seeing  it  with  gusto  ;  and  as  in  those  days 
to  see  life  was  to  be  drunk  often  and  to  frequent 
all  sorts  of  lusty  company,   it  was  not  long  ere 
Morland  began  to  go  to  the  bad.      He  had  the 
appetites  of  a  sailor   come  ashore  from  a  seven 
years'  cruise,  and  in   his  landlord   he  found  (to 
complete  the   analogy)  the   cruellest  of  crimps. 
Escaping    at    last,    he   went  to   Margate,    where 
he  painted  a  number  of  miniatures,  and  whence 
he    returned    to    London    to    produce    his    first 
successes — The  Idle  Mechanic  and  The  Industrious 
Mechanic,    which    were    instantly    engraved — and 
to  meet,  woo,  and   marry  Nancy  Ward,  a  sister 
of  Ward    the  engraver,   who    presently  married 
Morland's  sister,   Maria.      The  two  couples  lived 
together    till    they    quarrelled  ;    when    Morland, 
after    a    short    stay    in    Great    Portland    Street, 
migrated  to  Camden  Town,  Lambeth,  East  Sheen. 


132  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

Queen  Anne  Street,  the  Minories,  Kennington, 
Hackney,  and  so  to  the  '  rules '  of  the  Bench,  and, 
finally,  to  a  spunging  -  house  in  Clerkenwell, 
where  he  fell  ill  and  died. 

His  life,  the  while,  was  as  it  were  a  double  strand 
of  hard  drinking  and  hard  work.  He  '  spreed '  at 
painting,  and  he  '  spreed '  at  life.  He  produced 
with  extraordinary  facility  ;  his  hand  was  not  less 
ready  and  accomplished  than  his  brain  was  prodigal 
of  pictorial  inventions  ;  he  designed  and  painted 
subjects  and  animals,  and  indecencies,  and  land- 
scapes, and  marines,  with  equal  gusto  and  dexterity 
and  force  ;  his  temperament  was  so  abounding  that 
he  was  long  able  to  keep  pace  with  his  abounding 
popularity  ;  obliging  dealers  aiding,  he  coined 
himself  into  guineas,  and  so,  like  the  reckless  and 
passionate  unthrift  he  was,  he  flung  away  his  genius 
and  his  life  in  handfuls,  till  nothing  good  was  left 
him  but  the  silence  and  the  decency  of  death. 

In  all  the  range  of  British  art  there  are  few 
things  better  than  a  good  Morland.  It  has  been 
complained  of  him  that  his  tastes  were  '  coarse,' 
that  his  habit  of  mind  was  '  low,'  that  his  was  a 
'vulgar  and  unseemly  soul,'  and  all  the  rest  of  it ; 
and  it  is  obvious  that  for  those  who  look  to  art 
for  moral  and  spiritual  meanings,  and  are  content 
to  do  without  painting  if  only  they  can  carry  away 
a  little  literature,  his  work  is  a  kind  of  outrage. 
For  Morland  was  nothing  if  not  a  painter,  and 
Morland's  pictures  are  nothing   if    not  arrange- 


ARTISTS  AND  AMATEURS  133 

ments  of  paint.  He  was  a  vig-orous  aurl  ex- 
pressive draughtsman  ;  he  had  the  craftsman's 
sense  of  his  material  and  the  craftsman's  delight 
in  the  use  of  it.  Further,  he  was  a  colourist  ; 
and  the  fact  remains,  that  his  pictures  are 
painter's  work,  and,  whatever  their  morals,  must 
ever  live  with  the  eternal  life  of  art. 


II 

WiLKiE,  '  a  pictorial  Gait/  was  less  a  painter — 
less  a  master  of  paint — than  a  delineator  of 
character     and     '  an     anecdotist    in  DAVID 

cclour  and  form.'     In  that  capacity  WILKIE 

he    has    given    pleasure    to    several  1785-1841 

generations  of  good  folks,  who  know  not  what 
painting  is.  His  pictures  were  long  most  popular 
with  engravers ;  and  it  is  in  these,  I  take  it,  that 
he  survives,  for  'tis  a  fact,  I  fear,  that  in  this 
Burne-Jonesian,  'this  ghastly,  thin-faced  time  of 
ours '  his  colour  feels  mean,  his  drawing  seems  to 
lack  energy  and  strength,  his  art  is  seen  to  par- 
take too  much  of  the  cliaracter  of  cheap  literature,^ 

^  The  '  Jisthetic  Movement '  has  made  painting  so 
excessively  literary,  that  either  it  is  literature  in  a  new 
medium  or  it  is  nothing.  But  the  literature  is  not  for  the 
crowd:  it  is  high-romantic,  old-world,  mystical;  and 
with  the  crowd,  which  loves  incident,  and  is  interested  in 
character,  it  passes  for  painting.  All  the  same  the  differ- 
ence between  The  Blind  Fiddler  and  (say)  Cophetua  and  the 
Beggar  Maid  is  not  so  great  as  at  first  may  seem.    [1901.] 


134  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

while  he  himself  has  far  more  the  look  of  a  man 
of  letters  who  has  deviated  into  paint  than  of 
the  painter  somehow  mixed  up  with  letters^  which 
he  really  was.  For  all  that,  Wilkie's  is  a  pathetic 
figure.  If  he  erred,  it  was  because  he  knew 
no  better ;  and,  being  a  Scot,  he  had  but  to 
learn  the  truth,  to  risk  his  all  upon  its  capture. 
Paint  as  Velasquez  knew  it  was  unknown  to 
Wilkie  till  he  was  a  man  of  forty-two  ;  and  it 
is  infinitely  to  his  credit  that  he  no  sooner  knew 
what  it  was  than  he  began  to  experiment  in  the 
right  use  of  it.  That  he  should  fail  was  inevitable  : 
he  had  been  going  astray  with  all  his  heart  for 
some  five-and-twenty  years,  and  the  time  of  learn- 
ing had  passed  for  him.  But  at  least  he  tried 
his  best,  and  to  the  student  of  art  the  failures  of  his 
latter  years  are  far  more  moving  than  the  successes 
of  his  earlier  days  are  'humorous.'  They  show 
that  he  had  in  him  to  be  good  as  well  as  popular, 
and  that  his  consciousness  of  failure  must  have 
made  life  hard  to  endure. 


Ill 

The    achievement    of    this   pious    and    painful 
creature  has  provoked  some  ecstasies  of  encomium  ; 
but  it   is  scarce   possible   to  regard 
PROUT  Yam  as   other  than  a  good,  honest, 

'^  '^"'  ^^  industrious,  and  faithful  architectural 

draughtsman.      If  no  more  than   painfulness  and 


ARTISTS  AND  AMATEURS  135 

piety  be  asked  of  him,  he  will  triumph.  But 
if  his  work  be  taken  and  considered  as  art 
— that  alters  the  case ;  for  it  is  found  that  there 
is  no  more  warrant  for  his  pre-eminency  than  a 
certain  amount  of  rhetoric  on  the  part  of  a 
third  person.  There  is  no  doubt  at  all  that  Prout 
was  conscientious,  literal,  exact,  laborious ;  but 
neither  is  there  any  that  his  colour  was  poor  and 
thin,  that  his  method  was  small,  and  that,  once 
we  cease  to  consider  him  as  a  magazine  of  facts, 
he  goes  to  the  bottom  of  time  with  the  great  mass 
of  the  English  ^Vater-colour  School. 


IV 

Hunt  was  deformed  and  sickly,  never  married, 
began  by  painting  landscapes  and  vegetables,  went 
on  to  deal  with  comic   rustics,  and 
ended    as    a    painter    of    fruits   and 
flowers.       He   was   a    patient,    hard- 
working, devout  student  of  facts,  and  he  did  his 
utmost  to  render  the  forms  and  hues  and  textures 
of  objects  with  meticulous  and  literal  fidelity.     His 
success  in  the  pursuit  of  this  ambition  has  made 
his  work  the  theme   of  an    immense  amount   of 
overpowering  eloquence  ;    but  his  ideal,  however 
estimable   in   itself,    and   however    useful    in   the 
development  of  (say)  a  professor  of  botany,  was 
in  most  respects  remote  from  paint.     In  fact^  his 


136  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

regard  for  detail  produced  a  style  that  is  so 
niggled  and  so  petty  as  to  be  merely  contemptible  ; 
his  determination  to  be  exact  resulted  in  the 
achievement  of  effects  in  colour  that  are  only 
garish  and  unpleasing ;  in  his  resolve  to  omit 
nothing  he  lost  count  of  his  subjects  as  wholes, 
ignored  such  essentials  as  breadth  and  mass,  forgot 
the  very  existence  of  such  essentials  as  atmo- 
sphere and  light.  He  was,  no  doubt,  a  pleasant 
humourist ;  he  took  an  intelligent  interest  in  a 
great  variety  of  facts  ;  he  was  always  conscientious, 
and  he  was  generally  vulgar.  Withal,  he  was  so 
indifferent  to — or  so  unconscious  of — some  primary 
constituents  in  art,  that  to  call  him  artist  is  to 
abuse  the  word. 


Sir  Edwin  Landseer's  last  years  were  wrecked 
with    melancholy,    his    hand    long    outlived     its 

cunning.     All  the  same,  he  was  pro- 

LAND.SEER        ,    ,  ,     .,  .  ,  •    .      fi    . 

babiy  the  most  popular  painter  that 
1802-1873 

ever  lived.  The  English  are  a  sport- 
ing and  a  petting  people ;  and  in  Landseer,  with 
his  extraordinary  gift  of  sympathy  with  animals, 
they  found  and  recognised  an  absolute  English 
painter.  Then,  his  facility  was  prodigious,  and 
the  chief  engraA'ers  of  his  epoch — Holl,  Cousins, 
Heath,  Lewis,  Thomas  Landseer,  Finden,  Graves, 


ARTISTS  AND  AMATEURS  137 

and  the  rest — were  all  employed  upou  him.  At 
one  time  there  was  scarce  a  house  in  Britiiiii 
that  was  not  decorated  with  Landseers,  and 
there  are  not  many  even  now  in  whose  decora- 
tion a  Landseer  is  not  included.  It  is,  indeed, 
in  black  and  white  and  at  second-hand  that  the 
man  is  most  himself.  He  is  of  those  who 
read  best  in  translation  :  he  was,  so  far  as  paint 
is  concerned,  not  specially  an  artist.  Now  and 
again  he  rises  to  a  certain  height  of  accomplish- 
ment, and  is  found  capable  of  brilliant  brush- 
work,  and  by  no  means  blind  to  the  fact  that  to 
exist  as  an  arrangement  in  paint  is  a  picture's 
first  condition  of  excellence.  But  while,  his 
notable  and  useless  dexterity  notwithstanding, 
his  interest  in  the  technical  parts  of  art  was 
superficial  and  intermittent,  his  interest  in  such 
minor  elements  as  character  and  incident  and 
sentiment  was  ever  vivacious  and  acute ;  so  that 
the  bulk  of  his  work  was  of  its  essence  non- 
pictorial,  and  he  survives  as,  not  an  artist  in 
paint  but,  the  author  of  a  vast  amount  of 
graphic  literature.  In  its  way  that  literature 
is  capital :  it  is  full  of  emotion  and  humour, 
it  is  brilliant  with  invention,  it  is  often  moving, 
it  is  commonly  ingenious  and  suggestive.  But 
it  is  essentially  popular,  and  it  is  mostly  innocent 
of  style. 


138  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

VI 

Harvey   was   skilful,    earnest,   and  ingenious ; 
his  invention  was  facile  and  sufficient ;   he  drew 
cleverly  and  carefully  ;  his  ambition, 
HARVEY  while  often  too  large  for  his  capacity 

^  °  '  ''  for  expression,  was  always   respect- 

able and  human.  He  is  seen — as  so  many  are 
geen — to  greater  advantage  in  his  sketches,  which 
are  spirited  and  taking,  than  in  his  finished  can- 
vases, whose  technical  virtue  is  not  often  good 
enough,  and  whose  colour  is  apt  to  be  unattractive 
and  uninspired.  Coming  in  the  brave  days  of 
Waverley  and  the  romantic  Renaissance,  he  chose, 
as  was  natural,  his  subjects  rather  more  for  their 
literary  than  for  their  pictorial  quality,  and  was 
long  content  to  practise  what  is  called — obligingly 
enough — '  imaginative  art,'  and  to  rival  with  Eraser 
and  Allan  in  the  production  of  painted  illustrations. 
He  had,  however,  a  true  affection  for  landscape  : 
he  used  it  with  understanding  and  sincerity  in 
most  of  his  subject  pictures,  and  for  some  years 
before  his  death  he  painted  nothing  else. 

VII 

Phillip,   called  'Phillip  of  Spain,'  began  as  a 
painting  man  of  letters,  and  ended  as  something 
of  a  painter  ;  and  it  is  therefore  safe 
PHILLIP  ^^    assume   that,  had  he  been  born 

18x7-1867  .^^^  ^  school,  he  would  have  been 

a  painter   from   the   outset,    and   at  the    last  as 


ARTISTS  AND  AMATEURS  139 

good  a  painter  in  fact  as,  by  the  operation  of  a 
pleasant  patriotic  fiction,  he  is  sometimes  made 
to  seem.     He  was  always  less  interested  in  paint 
than  in  character  and  incident ;  even  in  his  best 
years  his  colour  was  rather  vigorous  and  repre- 
sentative    than     spontaneously     and     essentially 
pictorial  ;   he   seldom   failed   to  touch   that  note 
of  commonness— of  mind,  intention,  effect— which 
is  the  distinguishing  mark  of  the  popular  artist. 
But  he  had   a  temperament  of  such  uncommon 
energy    and    strength  that   at    thirty-four,   after 
making  a  wash-pot  of  Moab,  and  casting  his  shoe 
over  Edom  for  full  seventeen  years,  he  was  able 
to    renew    his    ideals   and   his    method    and    his 
style  ;   and   for   the  rest  of  his   life   he  worked, 
according   to  his   lights   and    in   the   measure   of 
his  strength,  in  the   direction   of  better  things. 
It  is  not  for  every  one  to  lay  down  Wilkie  for 
Velasquez  ;  and  it  is  saying  much  for  Phillip  that 
he  did   so   to  such  good  purpose  as  to  leave  to 
posterity  the  task  of  deciding  whether  he  was,  or 
was  not,  a  painter. 

VIII 

The  results  in  poetry  of  Rossetti's  last  period 
were  published  soon  after  the  end,  and  it  was  seen 
that  they  were  the  work  of  a  man  of  j^^gg^^j 
genius  who,  if  his  imagination  flashed  ^8^8-1882 

splendidly  now  and  then,  had  lost  such 
hold  as  he  might  ever  have  had  on  the  essentials 


140  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

of  his  art.  As  for  his  painting,  a  chief  ambition 
of  his  friends  had  been  to  keep  his  good  things 
out  of  his  reach  ;  lest  his  humour  of  perfection 
—of  elaboration,  that  is :  elaboration  and  the 
imparting  of  extraordinary  significancies — had  been 
their  ruin. 

To  be  just  to   Rossetti   is   as   difficult  for  his 
friends  as  for  his  enemies.     These  remain  under 
the  spell   of    his   rare   endowment ;    while   those 
who  knew  him  not,   but  still  know  art,  are  con- 
scious mainly   of  the  bastard  issues  to  which  he 
led,  and  the  vicious  methods  which  he  practised 
into    popularity.      There  are  many  to   whom  his 
merit    consists   in   that  he   failed  in  two  several 
arts,    and    yet    contrived    to    create    enthusiasts 
for   and   against   his    results    in    both  ;    and    the 
position  of  these  is  perhaps  the  safest  of  all.     That 
in  both  he  has  but  to  be  weighed  in  any  balance 
to  be  found  wanting  is  plain.     What  has  yet  to 
be  demonstrated   is   to   what  the   deficiency  was 
due.       Was    it   a    fault    of   brain    and   tempera- 
ment? and  could  Rossetti  have  done  more  than  he 
did .''     Or  was  it  inherent  in  the  time  ?  was  it  the 
absence  of  a  convention  and  a  school .''  the  neces- 
sity of  experiment  ?  the  quest  of  ideals  impossible 
to  realise,  in  that  first  of  all  they  were  dimly  seen, 
and    next    that    the    means    of     expression — the 
grammar  of  style  and  words  and  paint— were  only 
to  be  achieved  through  greater  difficulty  and  dis- 
tress than  Rossetti  and  his  disciples  cared  to  face.^ 


ARTISTS  AND  AMATEURS  141 

The  truth  is  to  find.  What  is  not  uncertain 
is  that  Rossetti  himself  was,  from  the  first,  and 
in  both  paint  and  poetry,  peculiar  to  unhealthi- 
ness ;  and  that,  while  in  poetry  and  paint  he  was 
obviously  a  temperament,  he  habitually  exacted 
of  paint  the  effect  of  words,  and  resolutely 
imposed  upon  words  the  uses  and  the  duties  of 
paint,  and  so  was  what  is  called  an  artist  in 
neither.  He  had  ideas  (technical  and  other), 
invention,  imagination  ;  or  he  could  never  have 
painted  The  Blue  Bower,  nor  written  Love's  Nocturn, 
and  The  Blessed  Damozel,  and  some  passages  of  The 
House  of  Life.  But  it  may — it  must — be  protested 
that  the  results,  however  vigorously  and  directly 
they  appeal  to  a  certain  type  of  mind,  are  of 
their  essence  inartistic.  Mr.  Theodore  Watts 
has  written  some  eloquent  and  closely  reasoned 
pages  to  show  that  Rossetti  had  the  genius  of 
verbal  mystery,  and  was  in  touch  with  the  many- 
sided,  enormous,  ever-shifting  issues  of  romance ; 
and  Mr.  Theodore  Watts,  who  knows  his  trade,  and 
has  proved  that  he  can  handle  his  facts  to  good 
purpose,  is  no  doubt  right  in  some  parts  of  his 
contention.  But  if  he  can  read  Sister  Helen,  for 
example,  without  wishing  that  at  least  a  third 
of  it  had  remained  unwritten — or  at  least  un- 
printed — then  has  he  yet  to  show  that  he  is  fully 
alive  to  the  perfection,  and  at  every  point  awake  to 
the  completeness,  of  Kubla  Khan  and  the  Ode  to  a 
Nightingale  :  that  (in  fine)  he  knows  the  difference 


142  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

between  organic  art  and  art  that  is  inorganic 
in  that  the  life  it  lives  is  only  one  of  phrases 
and  suggestions,  the  half  of  which  we  should 
have  been  spared,  and  whose  aggregate  effect 
is  to  set  us  wondering  if  Milton  were  not  a 
mistake,  and  if  Shakespeare  would  not  really  be 
the  better  (as  Johnson  suggested  that  he  would) 
for  a  vast  deal  of  chastisement.  And  if  this  be, 
as  I  believe  it  is,  the  case  with  Rossetti  the  poet, 
how  and  in  what  terms  shall  the  case  be  stated 
against  Rossetti  the  painter  ?  Excessive,  tortured, 
morbid,  affected,  call  it  what  one  will,  Rossetti's 
feeling  for  words  was  real,  and  was  now  and 
then  expressed  in  finely  minted  verses.  Had  he 
as  real  a  feeling  for  paint .''  did  he  ever  contrive 
a  sequence  of  six  brush  or  crayon  strokes  which 
are  as  instinct  with  brain  and  style  as  (for 
instance)  his  *  Against  the  sunset's  desolate  dis- 
array' or  his  'And  thy  heart  rends  thee,  and 
thy  body  endures '  ?  ^Vas  his  colour  at  its  best 
as  exhilarating  and  delightful  to  the  eye  as — 
I  '11  not  say  Titian's  but — Monticelli's,  or  as  ab- 
solutely and  innately  a  component  of  his  idea 
as — I  '11  not  say  Rembrandt's  but — Corot's .''  I  do 
not  think  he  had. 

What  is  not  doubtful  is  that  on  occasion  his 
determination  to  have  colour  at  any  cost  in 
verse,  and  poetry  at  any  cost  in  colour,  was  so 
disastrously  effective  that  it  went  far  to  confuse 
one  art  with  another,  and  has  left  a  myriad  simple 


ARTISTS  AND  AMATEURS  143 

souls — who  at  bottom  only  clamour  to  be  edified  : 
who  resemble  nothing  so  much,  in  fact,  as  those 
male  and  female  children  which  are  the  School 
Board's  natural  prey — in  an  immense  perplexity 
as  to  whether  words  and  paint,  and  the  ideals  and 
conditions  thereof,  are,  or  are  not,  one  and  the 
same.  And  broadly  stated,  therein  consists  the 
argument  against  Rossetti.  Was  he,  either  in 
words  or  pigments,  an  artist?  And  if  he  were, 
what  were  Coleridge  and  Keats  in  the  one  medium, 
and  what  were  Velasquez  the  brushman  and 
Monticelli  (say)  the  colourmonger  in  the  other? 

The  truth  is  with  Time.  Meanwhile,  Rossetti 
created  a  school  of  painter  poets  and  a  school 
of  poet  painters ;  in  two  arts  he  remains  an 
influence  for  good  or  ill  as  marking  as  Wagner 
in  music  and  drama ;  and  in  both  his  effect, 
being  imperfect,  will  in  the  long  run  pass,  and  be 
forgotten  as  it  had  never  been.  The  thought  of 
such  a  waste  of  temperament  and  character,  of  the 
loss  of  so  many  genial  conclusions,  is  saddening ; 
but  to  be  consoled  one  has  but  to  remember  that 
Constable  —  who  is  Corot,  Rousseau,  Troyon, 
Millet,  the  Marises,  Israels — is  actively  alive. 
The  processes  of  the  Muse  are  bewildering  and 
discomforting ;  but  her  issues  are  unchangeable, 
and  her  judgments  compensate  for  all.     [1889.] 


144  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

IX 

Paul  Chalmers  went  often  afield  in  search   of 

subjects ;  but  he  lived  his  life  in  Edinburgh.     He 

was  twice  on  the   Continent,   and  a 

CHALMERS      ^j^j^  ^^  Holland    (in    1874)    had    a 

^  ^   ^  ^  marked   influence  on  him  :  however 

basely,  his  own  style  of  handling  was  already  in 
a  line  with  Rembrandt's,  and  his  fuller  know- 
ledge of  that  master's  methods  was  an  intractable 
inspiration.  He  was  a  born  colourist:  he  was 
inclined  to  sacrifice  everything  to  colour.  His 
nature  was  intensely  sympathetic :  '  He  could 
never  paint  what  he  did  not  feel.'^  His  early 
style  was  laboured  and  hard,  but  he  developed 
larger  methods.  Much  of  his  work  remains 
incomplete,  because  his  standard  was  so  high, 
and  his  accomplishment  so  inexact,  that  he  was 
apt  to  fail,  and  fail  again,  till  he  wearied  of 
endeavour,  and  lost  interest  and  heart.  He  was 
never  careless  nor  superficial,  but  took  infinite  pains 
to  master  his  subject,  and  get  himself  inside  it; 
he  has  been  known,  indeed,  to  have  as  many  astwo- 
and-ninety  sittings  for  a  single  portrait.  ^  It  was  at 
once  his  misfortune  and  his  fault  that  he  could 
never  satisfy  himself:  that  he  was  unable  to  see 

1  Who  can?    [1901.] 

2  I  am  told  that  the  greatest  English-speaking  painter 
insists  on  even  more.  But,  then,  he  always  does  the  trick. 
Chalmers  did  not.     [1901.] 


ARTISTS  AND  AMATEURS  145 

when  a  picture  was  as  complete  as  he  could  make 
it.  In  the  result  he  loved  mystery,  half-tones,  the 
intercourse  of  light  and  shade  :  whatever  was  hard 
and  straight  and  precise  was  odious  and  unpaint- 
able.  He  was  sometimes  an  artist ;  he  was  always 
more  or  less  artistic  ;  but  he  was  incomplete,  or 
imperfectly  developed.  He  was  disastrously 
affected  by  irresolution  and  fastidiousness;  but 
those  who  knew  him  best  say  that  in  years  to 
be  he  would  have  outgrown  his  faults,  and  his 
genius  would  have  had  full  play. 


PiNWELL  is  better  seen  in  black  and  white  than 

in    colour,    as    an   illustrator  than   as  a   painter. 

He  had    plenty    of  invention,    with 

FINWELL 
a  knack  of  composition,  facility,  a 

1842-1875 
certain  prettiness  and  charm  ;  and  as 

his  drawing  was  neat,  and  his  literary  apprehen- 

siveness  was   real,    he   was    found     successful    in 

suggesting  his  authors'  meanings  to  their  readers  : 

so  that  for  him  to  annotate  a  given  text  in  pictures 

was  held  a  piece  of  luck  for  both  poet  and  public. 

In   water-colours    his   merits    are   less   obvious — 

or,  rather,  are  largely  vitiated  by    the  presence 

of  some  strong  defects.      His  style  was  neither 

broad  nor  vigorous,  and  he  had  a  tendency  to  be 

niggled  and  small  in  handling,   lively  in  colour, 

K 


146  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

broken  in  composition,  and  divided  in  effect. 
Against  all  this,  there  must  be  set  the  fact  that, 
young  as  he  died,  he  was  somebody,  and  had 
already  identified  himself,  with  Walker  and 
Mason,  with  a  new  move  in  art. 


XI 

In  HoU's  essays  in  genre  he  strikes  a  note  which 
is  not  altogether  his  own — which  sounds,  indeed, 
FRANK  to  better  purpose  and  with  a  fuller 

HOLL  and  richer  sonority,  in  the  work  of 

1845-1888  Israels.     His  material  is  the  pathos 

of  poverty ;  his  colour  is  sombre  to  unpleasant- 
ness ;  his  effects  are  deliberately  melancholy.  In 
portraiture,  however,  he  remains  a  personality. 
He  was  the  painter  of  men.  His  studies  of  the 
other  sex  are  neither  sympathetic  nor  intelligent : 
the  pictorial  capacity  latent  in  the  costumes  and 
the  characteristics  of  modern  womanhood  were  not 
apparent  to  him  |  he  was  lacking  in  elegance, 
grace,  the  sexual  interest,  the  underwear  of  gaiety 
and  esprit ;  and  he  did  well  to  permit  himself 
few  chances  of  failure.  But  to  the  representation 
of  the  manhood  of  his  time  —  its  statesmen, 
churchmen,  financiers,  soldiers,  vestrymen  —  he 
brought  some  painter's  attributes.  A  student  of 
Velasquez  (to  consider  whose  work  he  made,  quite 
late  in  life,  a  special  journey  to  Madrid),  he  was 
himself  a  craftsman.     His  brush-work,  if  somewhat 


ARTISTS  AND  AMATEURS  147 

wanting  in  distinction,  was  measured,  dexterous, 
and  significant ;  lie  was  painter-like  in  his  use  of 
paint,  if  the  pattern  on  which  his  scheme  was 
executed  was  nearly  always  unbeautiful,  and 
commonplace  more  often  than  not ;  his  inven- 
tions, albeit  in  some  sort  coarse,  were  legitimate 
in  design  and  striking  in  effect ;  his  drawing  was 
vivacious  and  correct ;  and  his  modelling,  while 
deficient  in  subtlety,  said  all  it  set  out  to  say. 
Again,  his  insight  was  direct  and  truthful :  he 
was  unrivalled  in  his  generation  in  a  capacity 
for  seeing  his  sitters  as  materials  for  official 
portraitures,  and  for  expressing  their  public 
humanity  in  the  terms  of  paint ;  and  though  he 
cannot  be  held  to  have  had  style — in  the  sense 
that  Sir  Joshua,  or  even  Gainsborough,  had  style 
— he  had  a  manner,  and  that  manner  his  own. 
It  has  been  said  of  him  that  he  painted  history. 
But  he  was  the  historian  of  an  age  of  prose,  and 
his  medium  was  ever  the  prose  of  paint,  and  was 
sometimes  its  journalese. 


XII 

George  Manson  died  at  twenty-six  ;  but  he  had 
lived  long  enough  to  show  that  he  had  a  root  of 

the  matter   in  him.     His   draughts- 

,.  •  I.-        1  MANSON 

manship  was  expressive  ;  nis  colour, 

while    low    in   key   and    limited    in 

range,  was  real ;  his  interest  in  his  material  was 


148  VIEWS  AND  REVIEVTS 

sensuous  as  well  as  intellectual ;  he  was  addicted 
to  the  representation  of  character  and  humour, 
but  he  expressed  himself  in  pictorial  terms.  It  is 
probable  that  with  him,  as  with  some  other  'in- 
heritors of  unfulfilled  renown' — a  phrase  that 
seems  to  act  on  men  like  haschisch  in  the  way 
of  developing  an  abnormal  sense  of  possibilities 
— too  much  has  been  made  of  what  he  did,  and 
far  more  than  enough  of  what  he  never  got  a 
chance  to  do.  But  there  is  little  doubt  that  he 
would  have  lived  a  painter,  and  that  his  death 
was  a  loss  to  the  Scottish  School. 


TWO   MODERNS 


Webk  the  august,  unedifying  corporation  pre- 
sided over  by  Sir  Frederick  Leighton  elected  on 
the  sole  grounds  of  art,  a  very  large  CHARLES 
proportion   of  Mr.    Charles  Keene's  KEENE 

innumerable  contributions  to  Punch  1823-1891 

would  have  been  signed  and  sponsored  by  a  real 
R.A.  It  has  been  said,  indeed — and  with  only  a 
seeming  exaggeration — that  there  is  right  pictorial 
art  enough  in  any  one  of  that  gentleman's  Punch 
drawings  to  furnish  forth  a  whole  gallery  in  the 
summer  exhibition  at  Burlington  House,  and  leave 
no  inconsiderable  amount  of  the  same  rare  quality 
for  distribution  among  such  of  the  sacred  Forty  as 
have  not  already  come  in  for  their  share.  It 
sounds  excessive  ;  but  the  sense  is  beyond  dispute. 
Pictorial  art  is  not  wholly  a  matter  of  paint  and 
canvas  and  gold  frame  and  a  number  in  a  cata- 
logue. On  the  contrary,  it  is  so  little  a  matter 
of  these  things  that  it  is  absent  from  at  least 
nine-tenths  of  the  combinations  of  these  things 
which  are  achieved  and  presented  in  the  course 
of  the  Royal-Academical  year. 

149 


150  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

Mr.  Keene  has  never  dealt  in  auy  of  them,  it  is 
believed ;  or  if  he  have,  it  has  been  so  much  for 
his  own  amusement  that  he  has  never  deigned 
to  ask  the  public  what  it  thought  of  his  results. 
But  for  all  that  he  has  been  almost  insolently 
prodigal  of  proofs  that  he  possesses  all  the  essential 
qualities  that  go  to  make  the  true  pictorial  artist, 
and  possesses  them  in  rare  fulness  of  measure. 
Thus,  to  begin  with,  he  is  a  draughtsman  of 
singular  faculty  and  skill,  whose  touch  is  large, 
unfaltering,  admirably  adroit,  and  more  capable, 
certainly,  of  suggestion  and  expression  than  that 
of  any  other  living  Englishman  ;  he  is  a  colourist 
in  black-and-white,  and  it  is  a  continual  refresh- 
ment to  the  eye  to  watch  him  so  balancing  his 
masses,  and  so  arranging  his  lights  and  shadows, 
as  to  make  his  work  above  and  before  everything 
else  a  picture ;  his  capacity  for  design  —  for 
covering  a  given  surface  with  a  rhythmical  and 
orderly  arrangement  of  forms  and  lines — is  in- 
exhaustible ;  his  gift  of  selecting  and  presenting 
the  purely  pictorial  elements  of  a  character  or  a 
scene  is  so  seldom  found  wanting  that  its  exercise 
seems  almost  mechanical.  It  is  just  these  qualities 
that  are  inconspicuous  in  modern  English  paint, 
and  it  is  in  the  possession  of  just  these  qualities 
that  Mr.  Keene  is  thrice-fortunate.  There  is 
no  doubt  that  he  is  a  student  of  character, 
none  that  he  is  an  excellent  humourist,  none  that 
his  results  are  commonly  touched  with  the  right 


TWO  MODERNS  151 

inspiration  of  comedy  or  farce.  But  it  is  the  prime 
distinction  of  his  work  to  be  essentially  art.  You 
look  at  it  as  an  aspect,  a  pictorial  combination  of 
black-and-white,  an  effect  achieved  by  certain 
contrasts  of  light  with  dark  and  line  with  form, 
before  you  dream  of  inquiring  into  its  details,  and 
you  master  it  point  by  point  before  you  care  to 
take  a  thought  of  the  legend  it  is  supposed  to 
illustrate.  The  character,  the  fun,  the  furniture 
and  decoration — in  a  word,  the  literary  interest — 
are  all  subordinate  to  the  pictorial  quality.  Yes, 
the  old  gentleman  (now  you  look  at  him  !)  is  de- 
lightful, of  course  ;  and  the  suggestion  of  breadth 
and  extreme  solidity  conveyed  by  the  back-view 
of  his  helpmeet  is  simply  enchanting.  But  these 
elements  are  only  a  pretext  for  design.  The 
facts  are  beyond  questioning,  the  presentation  of 
character  is  not  less  exhilarating  than  accom- 
plished, the  jest  is  delightfully  conveyed ;  but 
the  artist  has  seen  them  first  and  last,  not  as 
so  much  literature-in-the-flat  but,  as  so  many 
elements  in  a  scheme  essentially  and  unalterably 
pictorial.  That  they  happen  to  be  interesting  and 
attractive  for  other  reasons  and  from  another 
point  of  view  has  really  nothing  to  do  with  it. 
The  effect  of  Rodin's  bronzes  is  liberally  and 
intensely  suggestive  of  human  passion  ;  but  they 
begin  and  end  as  achievements  in  sculpture. 
It  is  the  same — mutatis  mutandis — with  the  black- 
and- whites  of  Mr.  Charles  Keene.     Their  effect  is 


162  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

largely  humourous,  but  they  begin  and    end  as 
achievements  in  design, 

.  They  say  that  his  range  is  limited ;  and  if  they 
leave  out  of  count — as  undoubtedly  they  do — his 
notable  gift  of  art,  they  are  well  within  their 
rights.  Mr.  Keene  the  humourist  is  not  nearly 
so  rich  and  vigorous  and  varied  an  experience 
as  Mr.  Keene  the  master  of  colour  and  design. 
But  Mr.  Keene  the  humourist  is  the  last 
in  the  world  to  be  put  superbly  by.  His 
material  is  either  ugly  or  grotesque  :  he  cannot 
present  you  with  a  lady,  and  there  is  more  than 
a  smack  of  the  ^commercial'  in  his  gentlemen; 
his  maids  are  own  sisters  to  their  mistresses,  and 
his  Highland  chieftains  are  of  one  strain  with 
the  gillies  and  the  keepers  that  accompany  their 
walks  abroad.  But  the  reproach  is  not  for  Mr. 
Keene  alone.  John  Leech,  for  instance,  never 
drew  a  lady ;  his  gentlemen  are  '  tigers '  one  and 
all ;  his  type  of  beauty  is  about  as  variable  as  the 
aspect  and  eflFect  of  a  Times  leader;  he  is  the 
funniest  person  (perhaps  !)  that  ever  expressed 
himself  in  drawing;  but  his  limitations  are  as 
plain  as  the  nose  on  your  face.  Mr.  Du  Maurier, 
again — well  !  does  Mr.  Du  Maurier's  range  come 
any  nearer  to  being  universal  than  Leech's  }  And 
is  it,  when  all's  said,  so  much  as  a  barleycorn 
wider  than  Mr.  Keene's  ?  Ilis  high-nosed  Duchess, 
his  long-legged  Colonel,  his  Bishop,  his  Vulgarian, 
his  German  Musician — has  not  one  seen  them  all 


TWO  MODERNS  163 

a  thousand  times?  Does  not  one  know  them  as 
one  knows  the  clock?  There  is  notliing  in  physi- 
ognomy if  his  Maids  are  not  their  own  Mistresses 
in  disguise :  there  is  nothing  in  heredity  if  his 
Butlers  are  not  his  Bishops  just  a  little  run  to 
seed.  Mr.  Keene  is  not  nearly  so  funny  as  Leech, 
and  has  no  more  right  to  be  accused  of  '  universality 
of  type '  (as  the  saying  is)  than  Mr.  Du  Maurier  : 
though  if  it  came  to  design — to  the  comparison  of 
the  two  as  artists  pure  and  simple — there  would, 
may  be,  be  something  else  to  say.  But  within  his 
marches  he  not  only  calls  nobody  master  but  is 
far  and  away  the  best  and  strongest  champion  we 
have.  His  Scotsmen  may  or  may  not  be  all  the 
heirs  of  Bruce  and  Burns  would  like,  but  they 
are  irresistibly  funny ;  his  '  gents '  are  gents  innate 
and  irreclaimable,  his  servant-girls  have  scarce  an 
aspirate  in  all  the  length  and  breadth  of  their 
constitutions ;  his  cooks,  his  keepers,  his  cabmen, 
his  elderly  ladies,  his  Irish  peasants,  his  board- 
school  boys  and  teachers — if  all  these  be  not 
intimately  observed  and  absolutely  realised,  then, 
surely,  the  theory  of  observation  and  the  ideal  of 
realisation  are  lost.  As  for  his  drunkards — 
(English  and  Scots) — and  his  old  gentlemen  in 
the  City,  I  hold  them  sacred,  and  I  '11  not  discuss 
them — I  will  look,  and  uncover,  and  pass.  They 
are  among  the  good  things  of  comic  art ;  and  to 
speak  of  them  save  with  gratitude  and  respect 
were  to  show  oneself  unworthy  their  ac(£uaiutaace. 


154  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

The  man  with  whom  he  has  most  in  common  is 
Honore  Daumier^  and  that  this  can  he  said  of  him 
is  vastly  in  his  praise,  for  Daumier  was  the  greatest 
master  of  the  grotesque  that  ever  found  expression 
in  line.  Like  Mr.  Keene's,  his  material  is  either 
ugly  or  ridiculous ;  and  to  consider  his  fierier 
energy,  his  more  consummate  mastery  of  means, 
his  ampler  and  more  vigorous  capacity  for  realisa- 
tion and  suggestion,  is  to  exult  in  the  reflection 
that  an  Englishman  is  the  richest  of  his  heirs. 
[1890.] 


II 

To  talk  of  a   British  school  of  sculpture   were 

much  the  same  as  to  talk  of  woods  where  are  no 

trees.    They  have  manag-ed  the  matter 
AUGUSTE 

far  better  in  France,   for  there  the 
RODIN 

sculpturesque   tradition   is  centuries 

old,  and  has  endured  without  a  break :  so  that 
where  we  have  perforce  to  refer  to  Torrigiano 
and  Roubillac  and  Canova  and  Boehm — foreigners 
all,  yet  British  in  virtue  of  their  achieve- 
ment —  they  can  discourse  at  will  of  Jean 
Goujon  and  Puget,  of  Houdon  and  Rude  and 
Barye,  to  name  but  these,  who  are  French  of  the 
French  in  virtue  of  birth  and  training  and  con- 
vention. Just  now,  it  is  true,  we  can  rejoice 
in  the  work  of  Messrs.  Gilbert  and  Onslow  Ford  ; 
but    both    these    are    French    by  education    and 


TWO  MODERNS  155 

accomplishment,  and  ag'ainst  them  Paris  can  set 
a  rouud  dozen  at  least :  among  them  such  men 
as  Paul  Dubois,  Mercie,  Gaudez,  Dalou,  Cain, 
Fremiet,  and  above  all  Auguste  Rodin  :  the  last  a 
culmination  after  his  kind,  whose  work  is  instinct 
with  genius,  as  well  as  being  a  prodigy  of  accom- 
plishment and  style. 

There  is  little  to  say  of  him  by  way  of  biography. 
He  is  some  forty  or  fifty  years  old ;  he  was  a 
pupil  of  Barye  and  Carrier-Belleuse  ;  he  worked 
a  great  deal  at  Sevres ;  he  has  '  ghosted '  in  his 
time,  and  in  his  time  has  been  accused  of  casting 
his  creations  from  the  life  ;  he  has  received  some 
third-class  medals ;  he  has  been  twice  or  thrice 
the  hero  of  a  Government  purchase ;  he  is  re- 
presented in  the  Luxembourg  ;  he  had  the  honour 
to  be  rejected  a  year  or  two  ago  by  the  jury  of 
the  English  Royal  Academy  ;  he  is  the  author  of 
a  John-Baptist,  an  Age  of  Bronze,  an  Eve,  a 
number  of  busts  —  Rochefort,  Hugo,  Carrier- 
Belleuse,  Antonin  Proust,  Henri  Becque,  and 
others — the  tremendous  group,  les  Calaisiens,  for 
Calais,  innumerable  figurines  and  fantasies ;  he 
has  been  engaged  for  years  on  a  pair  of  bronze 
doors  for  the  Palais  des  Arts  Decoratifs  —  the 
most  prodigious  monument  to  Dante  and  the 
Commedia  that  has  yet  been  done ;  he  is  just  now 
busy  with  a  memorial  to  Bastien-Lepage  for  Dam- 
villiers  and  a  Claude  Lorraine  for  Nancy.  That 
is  about  all  that   need — or   can — be  told  of  the 


156  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

man ;  while  as  for  the  artist,  his  time  is  to  come, 
and  as  yet  he  exists  but  for  his  fellow-craftsmen 
and  the  few  outside  the  arts  that  know  and  are 
moved  by  greatness  when  they  see  it. 

Yes ;  greatness  is  the  word.  So  excellent  a 
judge  as  M.  Dalou,  the  artist  of  much  that  is 
large  in  conception  and  vigorous  and  accomplished 
in  method  and  style,  has  declared  that  when  the 
century  goes  out  it  will  remember  the  aforesaid 
pair  of  doors  as  its  heroic  achievement  in  sculpture  ; 
and  M.  Dalou  speaks  as  one  having  authority  and 
in  the  name,  I  take  it,  of  all  his  brother-wooers 
of  the  Muse.  And  if  that  be  true— as  I  believe 
it  to  be  true— then  where  between  himself  and 
Michelangelo  is  there  so  lofty  a  head  as  Rodin's  ? 
True,  there  is  Barye  ;  and  he,  too,  had  genius 
and  style,  and  he,  too,  was  a  path-breaker  and  an 
influence.  And  true,  there  was  Alfred  Stevens, 
who  was  gifted  as  few  have  been,  and  whose  work 
is  by  far  the  best  evidence  of  a  capacity  for  the 
highest  in  sculpture  that  Britain  has  to  show. 
But  Barye's  range  was  limited :  great  artist,  and 
great  sculptor  as  he  was,  he  was  an  animalier  or 
he  was  something  of  a  mediocrity ;  and  great 
artist,  and  great  sculptor,  as  he  was,  he  had  the 
faults  of  his  environment,  and  was  a  victim  as  well 
as  a  hero  of  Romanticism.  As  for  Stevens,  he 
might,  sure,  have  done  anything  he  chose,  and 
have  risen  to  those  heights  of  achievement  which  are 
inaccessible  to  all  but  the  very  great ;  but  his  lot 


TWO  MODERNS  157 

was  cast  on  evil  days,  and  he  remains  an  example  of 
the  strange,  perplexing  carelessness  with  which  our 
Britain  wastes  her  rarest  and  sweetest  energies. 
It  is  different  with  Rodin.  He  has  suffered  like 
the  rest — like  Barye,  Millet,  Corot,  Rembrandt, 
all  the  men  who  came  with  a  message  to  times 
not  ready  to  give  it  ear ;  but  like  these  others 
he  has  made  his  chance,  and  like  these  others 
he  has  assured  himself  of  victory.  His  busts 
alone  were  enough  to  place  him  in  the  future : 
the  style  of  them  is  so  complete,  the  treat- 
ment so  large  and  so  distinguished,  the  effect  so 
personal  yet  so  absolute  in  art.  The  Hugo,  for 
example,  makes  you  wonder  that  the  Contempla- 
tions, and  the  Miserables  are  no  stronger  than 
they  are ;  and  the  Hugo,  if  it  be  the  one  on 
which  the  master  lingered  longest,  is  by  no 
means  the  most  irresistible  of  the  group.  And 
the  busts,  whatever  their  number,  and  whatever 
their  individual  and  collective  worth,  are  only 
one  entry  in  the  general  account.  The  hand  that 
modelled  these  austere  yet  passionate  statements 
of  virile  force  and  suffering  and  endowment,  and 
expressed  their  sculpturesque  quality  in  such 
terms  of  art  as  recall  the  achievement  of  Donatello 
himself,  can  on  occasion  create  such  shapes  of 
beauty,  and  such  suggestions  of  elegance  and 
charm,  as  put  the  Clodions  and  the  Pradiers  to  the 
blush,  and  enable  you  to  realise,  in  the  very 
instant  of  comparison  and  contrast,  the  difference 


158  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

between  the  art  that  is  great  whatever  its  motive 
and  its  inspiration  and  the  art  that  only  passes  for 
great  because  it  happens  to  be  gracious  and  popular. 
And  with  Rodin^  as  with  Rabbi  Ben  Ezra,  "^the 
best  is  yet  to  be.'  His  Bastien- Lepage— which 
shows  the  painter  at  his  easel  in  his  working 
dress,  straining  his  shaded  eyes  to  focus  an  effect 
of  light — is  an  achievement  in  'realism'  that 
may  change  the  course  of  monumental  art ;  his 
Calaisiens — his  miserable  burghers  taking  leave 
of  their  fellow-townsmen  and  in  act  to  follow  the 
lead  of  the  heroic  Eustache  de  Saint-Pierre — is 
such  a  reading  of  history  into  sculpture  as  only 
comes  to  a  man  of  genius,  and  therewith  such  a 
suggestion  of  human  emotion  as  could  be  achieved 
by  none  save  a  master-craftsman,  who  is  also  a 
great  creative  artist ;  while  as  for  the  Dante 
Doors — so  abounding  in  invention,  in  realisation 
and  suggestion,  in  accomplishment  of  the  rai-est 
type — what  is  left  to  say  of  them .''  Except  that 
Rodin,  like  Dante,  has  '  seen  hell,'  and,  like  Dante, 
has  turned  the  experience  into  immortal  art, 
there  is  not  much.  Here,  if  you  will,  are  a 
thousand  hints  of  the  possibilities  of  human 
passion :  from  Paolo  and  Francesca  melting  into 
each  other : — 

'La  bocca  mi  bacio  tutto  tremanto' : — 

as  no  man  and  woman  have  done  in  sculpture  since 
sculpture  began,  to  the  nameless  miscreants,  the 


TWO  MODERNS  159 

very  dregs  of  the  damned,  that  crawl  and  writhe 
and  foison — always  in  the  terms  of  sculpture  ! — 
up  and  down,  and  in  and  out,  and  here  and  there 
and  everywhere,  in  enormous  yet  distinguishable 
complexity  all  over  the  master's  achievement. 
But  here  too  is  art :  here  is  sculpture  in  its 
essence,  sculpture  with  all  its  conditions  accepted 
and  fulfilled,  sculpture  as  strictly  sculptural  as 
the  Parthenon  Frieze.  You  may  read  into  it 
as  much  literature  as  you  please,  or  as  you  can ; 
but  the  interpolation  is  not  Rodin's  but  your 
own.  Sculptor  he  is,  and  sculptor  he  remains. 
No  doubt  he  has  read  his  Dante,  and  no  doubt 
his  work  would  have  been  other  than  it  is  had  his 
Dante  gone  unread.  But  it  exists  apart  from 
Dante,  and  if  the  Comrnedia  were  suddenly  to  dis- 
appear, the  loss  would  be — so  far  as  Rodin's  work 
is  concerned — no  loss  at  all.  It  is  not  literature 
in  relief  nor  literature  in  the  round  :  it  is  sculpture 
pure  and  simple.  And  if  the  sons  of  men  habitually 
expressed  themselves  in  similar  terms,  that  literary 
quality  on  which,  the  race  being  what  it  is,  it 
cannot  choose  but  depend  for  the  louder  and  the 
more  instant  pai-t  of  its  fame — that  literary  quality 
would  cease  from  troubling,  and  the  thing  itself 
would  exist  as  sculpture  pure  and  simple :  as 
those  prodigious  and  dreadful  conceptions  of  line 
and  mass  and  surface,  imagined  by  Michelangelo 
in  memory  of  Lorenzo  and  Giuliano  de'  Medici, 
exist  as  sculpture  pure  and  simple ;  with  the  in- 


160  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

comparable   prose   of  Donatello    and   the  august 
heroic  poetry  of  Phidias  and  Praxiteles. 

It  has  been  said  that  Rodin's  art  is  an  expres- 
sion of  passion.  That  is  true ;  but  it  is  true  in 
one  sense  only.  Passion  to  him  is  wholly  a 
matter  of  form  and  surface  and  line,  and  exists 
not  apart  from  these.  In  other  words  Rodin  is 
a  sculptor.  His  expression  consists  in  line  and 
form  and  surface ;  without  these  he  were  merely 
inarticulate — were  only  the  man  in  the  street. 
That  much  he  has  recognised  ;  and  the  result  of 
his  recognition  is  that  he  lives  for  art,  and  that — 
his  gift  being  what  it  is — if  sculpture  should  die 
with  him,  the  end  would  be  not  unworthy  of  the 
best  that  has  gone  before.  He  is  our  Michel- 
angelo ;  and  if  he  had  not  been  that,  he  might 
well  have  been  our  Donatello.  And  with  Phidias 
and  Lysippus  all  these  some-and-twenty  centuries 
afar,  what  more  is  left  to  say  of  the  man  of  genius 
whose  art  is  theirs .''     [1890.] 


A   CRITIC   OF   ART 

I.  M. 

R.  A.  M.  S. 

1847-1900 

Stevenson's  Veiasquez  is  no  new  book  :  it  has 
had  some  years  of  life,  and,  if  good  work  count  for 
aught  in  time  and  achievement,  it 
must  certainly  endure  while  painters  oncerning 
paint,  and  men  delight,  or  are  inter- 
ested, in  their  work.  I  know  but  one  book  to 
place  beside  it  in  English,  and  that  is  the  author's 
Rubens  ^ ;  and  I  think  that  as  yet  there  is  but  one 
in  French — the  admirable  Maitres  d' autrefois  of 
Eugene  Fromentin — which  has  anything  like  its 
interest  alike  for  artist  and  for  connaisseur.  This 
is  as  much  as  to  say  that  it  and  its  companion — the 
Rubens— are  the  sole  pieces  of  '^art  criticism,'  in 
the  right  sense  of  the  phrase,  that  we  have.  Now, 
there  are  critics  and  critics,  and  botween  them  it 

^  At  the  time  of  writing  the  apprehensive  and  charming 
causerie  which  prefaces  Mr.  Heinemaun's  Raebur.i  had 
not  been  published. 

I. 


162  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

is  as  variable  service  as  between  your  fat  King  and 
your  lean  Beggar.  'Enfin,'  Balzac  said  of  the 
Steinbock  of  la  C'ousine  Bette  :  the  Steinbock  who, 
having  approved  himself  a  sculptor,  and  won  old 
Hulot's  daughter  to  wife,  forgot  his  duty,  and 
kissed  his  genius  dead  in  the  arms  of  Mme. 
MarnefFe  :  '  Enfin  il  passa  critique  comme  tous 
les  artistes  qui  mentent  a  leurs  debuts.'  This  he 
said,  being  wellnigh  at  the  end  of  his  career, 
in  a  moment  of  peculiar  scorn ;  and  there  is  a 
sense  in  which  the  saying  is  eternally  true ; 
a  sense,  too,  in  which  it  is  capable  of  universal 
application.  To  Balzac  the  critic  was  a  writing 
or  painting  creature  which  had  failed,  but  which, 
in  its  endeavour  to  succeed,  had  learned  enough 
to  be  able  to  make  the  worst  of  any  good  thing 
done  outside  the  confines  of  its  crawl ;  and  I 
suppose  that,  as  Balzac  knew  his  Paris,  and 
suffered  in  his  person  from  all  sorts  and  conditions 
of  critical  activities,  from  Ste.-Beuve  downwards, 
we  may  take  his  word  for  it  that  critics  of  this 
make  there  have  ever  been,  and  will  ever  be,  while 
there  are  masters  of  genius  to  set  their  little  facul- 
ties at  work.  Comes  the  question : —  What  is  a  critic  ? 
And  even  here,  in  face  of  the  answer  that  a  critic 
is  a  man  with  a  special  and  peculiar  gift  of  appreci- 
ation, you  will  find,  if  you  care  to  look,  a  certain 
indestructible  element  of  rightness  in  Balzac's  de- 
scription. It  may  be  that  he  was  thinking,  when 
he  made  it,  of  the  literary  critic  best  esteemed  in 


A  CRITIC  OF  ART  163 

literary  history.  I  mean  Ste.-Beuve.  He,  also,  was 
of  those  artists  '  qui  mentent  a  leurs  debuts '  ;  for 
he  began  by  publishing  a  volume  of  verse,  which 
nobody  ever  reads,  and  a  novel,  which,  as  I  believe, 
not  half  a  dozen  living  men  have  read.  Yet  was 
he  an  incomparable  critic  of  the  arts  in  which  he 
failed  ;  *  and  we  are  as  like  to  see  another  Hugo, 
another  Alfred  de  Vigny  even,  as  another  Ste.- 
Beuve.  And  as  Balzac's  utterance  was  true  of  Ste.- 
Beuve,  so  likewise  was  it  true,  in  varying  degrees, 
of  the  authors  of  Velasquez  and  les  Maitres  d'autrc- 
fois.  Both  began  in  paint,  and  the  best  of  both 
is  seen  in  letters.  There  is  a  difference.  The 
author  of  Dominique  and  the  Maitres  d'autrefois 
came  near  to  being  a  painter ;  the  author  of  the 
Velasquez  and  the  Rubens  never  did  anything  of 
the  kind.  Yet  both  were  critics  of  the  sole  virtu- 
ous type.  Both  had  the  divine  gift  of  appreciation; 
both  had  painted  enough  to  be  experts  in  the 
technique  of  painting ;  to  neither  one  nor  other 
might  a  painter  appeal  as  a  man  of  letters  gone 
wrong ;  by  both  a  painter,  if  he  so  appealed,  was 
taken  at  his  own  valuation,  and  cast  into  outer 
darkness ;    by    both    a    picture    was    appreciated 

1  '  After  all,  what  are  the  critics  ?  Men  who  have  failed 
in  literature  and  art.'  Thus  after  Balzac:  thus,  or  very 
nearly  thus,  for  I  quote  from  memory :  the  Disraeli  of 
Lothair;  who  also  sarait  con  monde ;  who  also  had 
suffered ;  who,  in  defining,  voiced  the  passion  of  a  thou- 
sand sufferers  less  courageous  than  himself,  whether  to 
strike  or  steal. 


164  TIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

from  the  painter's  point  of  view  ;  by  boih,  and 
especially  by  the  author  of  Velasquez,  it  was  as- 
serted, not  categorically  but  none  the  less  trium- 
phantly, that  the  painter  sees  life,  form,  colour, 
romance,  beauty,  passion,  solely  in  the  terms  of 
paint :  so  that  he  who  reads  words  into  paint  is 
merely  a  literary  person  who  might  be  very  much 
better  employed.  Both,  in  fact,  were  anti-Ruskin ; 
and  as  yet  the  success  of  both  seems  in  some  sort 
inconsiderable.  I  say  'seems,'  for  I  believe  that 
both  have  won  the  race  hands  down.^ 


I  have  not  to  write  an  appreciation  of  les  Maitres 
d'autrefois  :  if  I  had,  I  should  have  to  transmute 

into  English  that  wonderful  three- 
STEVENSON       P^^®  portrait  of  Van  Dyck.     What 

I  have  to  do,  so  far  as  literature  is 
concerned,  is  to  note  that  in  the  Velasquez  and  the 
Rubens  Stevenson  has  done  for  England  what  in 
the  first  book  Eugene  Fromentin  did  for  France. 
Till  he  came,  the  literature  of  that  England  which  he 
loved  so  well :  the  literature  in  which  are  compre- 

1  I  do  not  forget  Mr.  Whistler's  enchanting  Ten  o^  Clock. 
But  that  is  aa  it  were  an  indigestion  of  strawberries,  a 
feast  for  the  high  Gods ;  and  I  fear  that  it  has  not  had 
anything  like  the  effect  to  which  its  art  and  brilliancy,  let 
alone  its  mere  Tightness,  entitle  it. 


A  CRITIC  OF  ART  165 

hended  the  Shakespeare  and  the  Milton  he  adored  : 
had,  as  they  say,  '  no  show '  in  this  matter.  Art- 
criticism,  so  called,  was  a  raging  and  soul-moving 
business.  Ruskin,  for  instance,  uplifted  a  most 
beautiful  voice,  and  tenored  nonsense,  nonsense, 
for  many  years  and  through  interminable  volumes, 
about  Turner,  Constable,  Rembrandt,  Augelico, 
Carpaccio,  William  Hunt — the  Lord  knows  who ; 
others  did  likewise  about  Rossetti,  others  about 
Millais,  others  yet  about  Burne-Jones.  I  do  not 
say  that  such  literary  exercises  as  Modern  Painters 
and  the  rest  are  impossible ;  for  to  say  that 
were  to  say  that  I  believe,  for  one  thing,  in  the 
disappearance  of  that  singular  and  penetrating 
product  of  the  years,  the  Person  Who  has  Found 
Culture,  and,  for  another,  in  the  miraculous 
development  by  everybody  who  goes  to  the 
Royal  Academy  exhibitions  of  a  feeling  for  paint. 
But  I  insist  upon  it  that,  since  Stevenson  lived 
to  produce  his  Velasquez  and  his  Rubens,  and 
in  the  achieving  of  these  ends  gave  the  public  a 
chance  of  understanding  what  the  painter  means 
when  he  puts  forth  a  picture,  the  chances  are 
largely  in  favour  of  the  gradual  elimination  of 
literary  interest  from  the  art-critic's  tale  of  tools. 
The  good  public  is,  after  all,  not  nearly  the  Fool 
Collective  that  some  would  have  us  believe.  To 
appeal  to  it  through  paint  alone  were  to  play 
skittles  with  certain  of  its  best  renowned  privi- 
leges :  its  understanding  of  and  delight  in  books, 


166  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

and  its  romantic^  not  to  say  bookish,  view  of  what  it 
holds  to  be  nature.  So  to  the  end  of  time  Apelles 
must  reckon  on  his  Cobbler :  even  as  to  the  end 
of  time  the  most  of  men  and  women  will  see  in  a 
picture  only  as  much  of  it  as  their  acquaintance 
with  letters  and  life  lets  them  see,  and  will  applaud 
a  painter  only  in  proportion  as  his  theory  of  life 
and  letters  jumps  with  theirs. 


But  the  human  race  is   compounded  of  many 
perplexing'  and  delightful  differences.     In  a  very 

great  part  of  it  there  must  exist  the 

His 

.  sense  of  colour,  or  the  sense  of  line, 

or  th  e  sense  of  line  and  colour.  There 
are  years  and  years  between  these  and  the  message 
of  the  Velasquez.  But  the  message  will  win  to 
these  in  time  and  by  degrees.  The  time  may  be 
long,  the  degrees  seem  imperceptible.  But  the 
message  will  arrive.  Stevenson  is  dead  but  now. 
But  I  love  to  think  :  if  you  will,  to  cherish  the 
illusion :  that  what  is  called  art  criticism  can 
scarce  ever  be  quite  the  same  it  was  when  he 
began  his  work  of  suggestion,  edification,  inspira- 
tion. Then  it  was  all  rhetoric  and  morals.  You 
esteemed  a  painter  because  he  exampled  the  charm 
of  the  domestic  hearth  ;  or  because.  Nature  being 
the  sole  and  only  thing  worth  taking  to  your 
soul,    he    treated   Nature    as   a   common    harlotj 


A  CRITIC  OF  ART  167 

and  did  what  he  would  with  her  ;  or  because  he 
could  neither  paint  nor  draw^  yet,  in  the  absence 
of  both  drawing  and  painting,  he  appeared  to  have 
something  to  say  which,  ill  said  or  not  at  all,  was 
yet  so  gloriously  suggested,  that  there  you  were, 
you  know  !  There  you  were  !  But  for  Steven- 
son, there  you  might  be  still.  But,  in  his  placating, 
irresistible  way,  he  took  his  public  to  first  prin- 
ciples. He  stood  by  the  elements  of  art.  He  led 
you  back  to  what  he  would  (in  talk)  have  called 
the  Almighty  Swells.  And  in  the  light  of  his 
smile,  not  less  than  in  the  light  of  his  teaching, 
such  a  pious  and  painful  achievement  in  pictorial 
sampler-work  as  The  Briar  Ro.se  (say)  never  so  much 
as  began  to  be.  Titian,  Claude,  Rembrandt,  Corot 
— to  one  ever  fresh  from  communing  with  these 
kings  of  paint,  how  else  than  futile  could  this 
poor  monument  of  industry  appear  ?  ^ 


Yet  this  Velasquez  of  his,  in  which,  having  as  by 
art-magic  got  into  the  painter's  skin,  he  explains 
his  man's   intentions   and   expresses 
his  man's  results  with  a  sobriety  of  'Bob' 

method,    a  justness  of  tone,  a  pre- 
cision  of  phrase  which    make   it   literature — this 
book,  I  say,  is    as    it   were   the    worst    of  him. 

^  A  true  painter  so  far  as  he  went,  he  would  have  nought 
to  do  with  any  of  this  school,  excepting  always  the  man  of 


168  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

I  ever  esteemed  him  a  far  rarer  spirit^  a  far 
more  soaring  and  more  personal  genius  than  I 
found  in  his  famous  cousin ;  and  in  this  view  I 
was  in  no  wise  singular.  Had  you  met  him  by 
chance^  and  been  privileged  to  hear  him  discourse 
on  his  prime  subject,  you  must  inevitably  have 
thought  him  a  prince  among  artists :  so  full  of 
reasoned  inspiration  were  his  conclusions,  so 
luminous  his  statements^  so  far-reaching  and 
suggestive  his  illustrations.  You  could  not  have 
helped  yourself;  yet  in  the  end  you  must  have 
wept  to  find  yourself  mistaken.  For  mistaken 
you  must  certainly  have  been  :  the  truth  being  that 
this  wonderful  and  delightful  creature^  though  he 
might  have  stood  for  the  Ideal  Artist,  had  never 
an  art  complete  in  all  his  fascinating  and  unique 
endowment.  Contained  in  him  were  the  be- 
ginnings of  all  the  arts  that  be  ;  but  they  were 
inarticulate,  and  as  it  were  incapable  of  self- 
assertion.  He  painted  in  a  way  ;  but  his  pictures 
were  only  suggestions  for  pictures ;  and  he  knew 
it.  I  have  seen  verse  of  his,  fit  and  unfit  for 
print,  which  showed  that  he  knew  as  much  of 
Milton's     aims     and     processes     as     he     did    of 

character  who,  a  ses  heures,  came  almost  as  right  in  paint 
as  he  got  near  to  being  right  in  poetry :  I  mean  Dante 
Rossetti.  For  the  rest,  the  painters  closest  to  him 
in  fact  and  sentiment  were  the  great  landscapists  of 
the  school  which  culminated  in  Corot.  Theirs  was  the 
art  of  painting  as  he  practised  it ;  and  his  was  practi- 
cally the  first  voice  uplifted  this  side  the  Channel  in 
their  praise. 


A  CRITIC  OF  ART  169 

Corot's.  He  delighted  in  great  music — in  Gluck, 
Mozart,  Handel,  Beethoven ;  but  his  sense  of 
it  was  rhythmical,*  so  that  to  him  melody  was 
largely  a  matter  of  accent  and  symmetry.  I 
need  scarce  say  that  music  ended  for  him  with 
Beethoven.  He  had  a  kind  of  technical  interest 
in  Berlioz,  as  a  great  artist  in  orchestral  colouring 
and  the  romance  of  instrumentation ;  but  for 
Wagner  he  cared  little.  In  his  serene  and  omni- 
scient enthusiasm  he  made  light  of  popularities  : 
as  Rossini's,  or  the  late  Munkacsy's,  or  the  living 
Holman  Hunt's.  He  hated  emphasis,  and  would 
be  content  with  naught  save  elegance,  dignity, 
truth.  Truth  he  would  have ;  but  if  it  came  to 
him  vulgarly  handled — as  it  did  in  the  achieve- 
ment of  (say)  Millais — he  withdrew  into  himself, 
and  sought  it  elsewhere.  If  he  failed  to  find 
an  ideal  in  Wagner,  he  turned,  with  a  far-away 
smile  in  those  '^eyes  of  youth'  of  his,  and  looked 
in  Corot,  or  Milton,  or  Gluck.  He  got  one 
in  all  these  ;  and  he  was  content  to  rejoice,  and 
let  the  phrasers,  the  Rhetoricians  with  a  Purpose, 
go.  I  speak  as  one  unauthorised  and  unofficial : 
as  one,  too,  who  had  not  seen  and  talked  with  him 
of  late ;   but  I  should  say  that  in   the  complete 

1  One  day,  wanting  to  tell  me  of  a  certain  number 
in  Jephthah,  he  beat  it  out  on  the  piano,  using  the 
keyboard  at  large.  We  got  the  music  afterwards ; 
and  the  rhythm  and  the  rhythmical  eflfect  were  exactly 
as  he  had  sketched  them.  But  the  intervals  were 
Handel's. 


iro  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

and  absolute  fusion  of  sentiment  with  dignity  he 
found  his  chief  joy  in  life.  A  good  Corot,  a 
good  Wordsworth  sonnet,  the  Andante  of  the 
C  Minor  symphony,  a  passage  in  Paradise  Lost  or 
the  Agonistes,  the  Lances,  the  "^ Troubled  Soul'  in 
Gluck's  Orphee — with  these  he  was  at  home.  They 
came  naturally  to  him.  The  second-best  did  not. 
I  would  say  of  him  that  he  had  so  fine  and  so 
instant  a  sense  of  essentials,  so  large  and  luminous 
an  outlook  on  results,  that,  being  human  and 
sincere,  he  could  not  find  in  himself  the  strength 
with  which  to  essay  achievement.  At  his  cradle 
the  Good  Fairy  said  : — 'I  give  him  all  the  gifts, 
and  he  may  do  anything.'  But  her  Wicked  Sister 
smiled,  and  answered  : — '  He  shall  have  so  much 
brains  that  he  shall  be  merely  futile.'  The  Bad 
Fairy  was  wrong,  in  part ;  for  he  created  art- 
criticism  in  England,  and  his  creation  will  not 
cheerfully  be  let  die.  But,  as  an  artist,  he  was 
inarticulate  ;  so  that  so  far  the  Wicked  Fairy  was 
justified. 


Literature  is  the  nearest  of  the  arts ;  for  the 

material  of  it  is  words,  and  words  are  the  stufi"  of 

intercourse,  the  material  of  life.     It 

is  not,  then,  surprising  that  Steven- 
and  Talk  /    .      ^  .,    ,  .         . 

son,  having  tailed  m  pamt,  began  to 

express  himself  in  words.     I  have  always  regarded 

his  resolve  as  a  piece  of  heroism ;  for  it  was  my 


A  CRITIC  OF  ART  171 

privilege  to   put  liim   in  the  right  way^  to  shape 
his  beginnings,  to  find  him  outlets  for  the  critical 
stuff   that   was    seething    and   teeming    in    him  : 
even  as  it  was  my  pain  to  overlook  his  efforts  to 
write  formal  English,  and  so  to  discipline  his  hand 
that  in  the  end  the  Velasquez  became   possible. 
He  hated   the   process.      Give   him    paint  and   a 
canvas,    and    he    could  splash   and   '  wallow '   and 
enjoy  himself;   give  him  a  piano,  and  a  sonata, 
or  the  redaction  of  a  symphony,  or  a  great  and 
noble  piece  of  Gluck,  or  Handel,  or  IMozart,  and 
he    was   happy    as    a    king.      But  letters  ...  a 
pen,  and  a  pot  of  ink,  and  a  few  sheets  of  paper, 
and    then  .   .   .   nothing  !      Or    nothing    till    the 
journal  appeared.      And  then  what  misery,  what 
shame,    what   an   odious   and    horrible   difference 
between  the  ambition  and  the  effect  !     In  brief,  he 
loathed  it  all  ;   and  had  there  been  no  wolf  at  the 
door,  there  had  been  no  R.  A.  M.  S.      Happily  the 
wolf  was  there ;   and   the    Velasquez  was  only  a 
question  of  time.      I  had  hoped  for  much  else : 
a  Philosophy  of  Life,  perhaps ;  perhaps,  had  the 
Gods  been   more  than   common  kind,  an  essay : 
lofty  yet  humorous,  real  yet  fantastic :  in  Romance. 
But  I  think  I  should  ever  have  held  that  his  true 
gift  was  Talk.     And  he  had  it— Heavens  !  in  what 
perfection  !     I  have  heard  the  best  of  my  time ; 
but  among  them  there  is  but  one  R.  A.  M.  S. 


172  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

In   a   famous    essay   on    Talk   and    Talkem,    his 

cousin   has  done  his  best  to  make  him  immortal. 

But  he  tells    of    the   '^Bob'   of    an 
The 

early  date  :    of  the  '  Bob '  who,  him- 

Cousins  ,„  J     X        f 

sell   a   man    grown,    a    graduate    or 

Cambridge,  with  his  mind — (such  a  mind  as  it 
was  :  daring,  humorous,  imaginative,  inordin- 
ately apprehensive  and  alert!)  —  made  up  on 
most  of  the  essentials  in  Life  and  Time  and 
Eternity,  came  on  him  where  he  lay — 'ill  abed, 
surrounded  with  manuscripts ' — haled  him  out  into 
the  open  air,  taught  him  to  drink  and  think,  to 
'^ swallow  formulas'  of  every  sort,  to  see  that  he 
could  not  live  his  life  in  Edinburgh,  that  art  and 
life  and  morals  were  not  made  in  that  unnatural 
way,  that  the  true  God  was  not  of  that  particular 
middle-class  device,  and  that  the  right  set  of  things 
was  to  get  out  into  the  open,  cleanse  your  soul  and 
spirit  in  the  ancient,  wholesome  fashion,  and  push 
forth  into  the  Infinite  on  your  own  account.  Lewis 
Stevenson  was,  of  course,  for  all  his  weak  lung, 
one  of  Fortune's  favourites;  but  I  have  ever 
thought,  and  I  shall  ever  believe  that,  in  having 
his  cousin  for  a  chief  influence  in  his  beginnings, 
he  was  favoured  beyond  Fortune's  wont.  Be  this 
as  it  may,  the  '  Bob'  he  pictures  in  Spring- Heeled 
Jack,  the  Houd,  copious,  and  intolerant  talker,' 
in  whom  he  takes  such  just  delight,  is  a  Bob  not 
known  to  the  present  generation.  'Tis  a  good  ten 
years  since  I  saw  the  last  of  that  exorbitant  and 


A  CRITIC  OF  ART  173 

amazing  person  :  a  person,  be  it  noted,  ever,  for 
all  his  amazingness  and  for  all  his  exorbitancy 
— ever  an  influence  for  the  best,  alike  in  Morals 
and  in  Art ;  and  I  can  say  with  a  certain  assur- 
ance that  the  younger  men  knew  nothing  of 
him.  VFhat  they  got  in  his  room  was  a  Someone, 
bright-eyed,  a  little  flushed,  ever  courteous,  ever 
kindly,  ever  humorous,  taking  any  bit  of  the 
Universe  as  his  theme,  descanting  upon  it  as  if 
he  had  a  prescriptive  right  in  it,  and  delighting 
every  one  who  listened  by  the  unfailing  excellence, 
wisdom,  sanity  (however  insane  it  seemed  at 
times  !)  of  what  he  had  to  say.  Says  a  friend 
of  his,  and  mine : — '  He  was  commentary,  and 
that  should  go  on  for  ever.  Good  commentary 
on  whatever  God  saw  fit  to  provide.  It  seems  to 
me  to  dwindle  the  applications  of  tlie  Universe 
that  it  can  no  longer  serve  for  his  interpretations.' 
That,  I  take  it,  is  Bob  caught  in  the  act  of  walking 
the  heights,  and  discoursing,  as  he  went,  on  things 
above  him  and  below.  And  had  Lewis  lived  to 
reassert  himself,  in  the  warm  body,  as  he  went 
on  till  the  end  asserting  himself  in  cold  print ; 
and  had  it  been  possible  for  any  of  us  to  sit 
end  heed  while  these  two — the  Master  and  the 
Pupil — talked  of  That  which  is.  That  which  must 
be,  and  That  which  may  be ;  then  should  we 
have  heard  about  the  best  that  speech  can  do. 


174  VIEWS  AND  REVIEWS 

Meanwhile,  both  lived  in  Arcadia,  and  both  are 

dead : — 

Cold,  cold  as  they  that  lived  and  loved 
A  thousand  years  ago. 

Each  is  a  loss  to  us.     But  I  think,  as  I  sit  here 

grieving  for  both,  that  we  shall  get  ten  Lewises,  or 

an  hundred  even,  or  ever  we  get  a 
Put  .^ohils 

Bob.      Nothing    like  him   has  ever 

passed  through  my  hands.  He  was 
what  I  have  said  ;  and  there  was  in  him  a  something 
mystical  which  I,  who  was  long  as  close  to  him  as 
his  shirt,  never  quite  fathomed.  Whatever  it 
be  worth,  he  died  in  the  glory  of  an  unalter- 
able Belief.  So,  if  his  radiant  spirit  endured 
undimmed  these  gradual  and  shameful  processes  of 
dissolution  by  which  so  many  of  us,  poor  worms 
that  we  are,  are  passed  into  the  unbroken  Silence, 
to  himself  he  went  trailing  clouds  of  glory.  So 
would  he  die  happily,  as  he  had  lived  well ;  and, 
with  the  antient,  brave  valediction  :  Ave,  f rater, 
atque  Vale  :  so  I  leave  him.  [1900.] 


THE    END 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 
Los  Angeles 
This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below.       ^ 


9-25m-8,'46(9852) 


3  1158  00614  5410 


I 


PLEA*^p  DO   NOT    REMOVE 
THIS   BOOK  GARD^ 


_  J 

^^•LlBRARY6k 


^- 


^,!/0JnVDJO^ 


University  Research  Library 


--J 


